AI Adoption & Keep Progressing Professionally

Something I’ve witnessed through hosting AI training and often speak about on my AI podcast is that AI is still very much a solo-player experience, and everyone is at such different stages of AI adoption and important at very different stages with their usage.

If you feel like you want to keep progressing, I recommend a few simple steps:

1. Write a list of problems you are trying to solve and solve often.

2. Work with AI (ask your LLM of choice) on how it can help you learn and create solutions. Add as a coworker, a copilot or an exec assistant in solving these problems, ask what tools and how they can shape your gems/skills/customgpts. You must know from experimenting when you use AI as an owner of the task, a collaborator, and where you remove AI from the process.

3. Go solve these problems with AI in the loop. Reverse engineer how you collaborated and attack different problems. It is important to keep a quick note throughout the process. AI is still trained on the best and the worst of the internet, books and content it consumed, so very often the output is very average without rich context and grounding of great content to work with

4. Don’t get swept up in feeling like you can work with the tools on things you aren’t great at. AI is great at analysis (in the right environment - it can struggle with colour coding sheets, cells and with blank rows etc), great at deep research (with very good prompts, remember to provide some guardlines) and offering assistance in writing.
   Just remember the 2 V’s of AI - to validate and verify the data and be the editor. Ask for its sources.

5. Collaborate with other people with AI, whether that's on a project or some work where you co-learn. Most teams need help and want to progress so help solve problems, help to advance their adoption of AI or guide them where it’s good and great with AI and prioritise a few exercises (performance marketing optimisation, user journey and experience mapping and optimisations, campaign analysis etc).

Bonus: know where your zone of genius is, keep optimising it, and use that muscle; many have outsourced to AI, and it’s slowly eroding their core skills.

If this is where you’re great at work, those muscles, especially using your gut to guide you.

For someone who’s gone from AI-pilled to AI realist in recent weeks, there are so many areas where, with a step back and an assessment of your own space, you’ll can land in a good place and won’t have FOMO, while being informed and educated to drive your career and AI usage forward.