Embrace AI to Optimize Your Role

My job is to help CEOs and leadership teams scale their companies and one of the big opportunities and risks right now that we see in the workplace is AI. If I'm the leader of an organization, odds are that I'm hearing through literally every source, through every sort of societal source there is, that now there's a better time to streamline all low-level tasks. There has never been, for better or for worse, more awareness of using technology to gain efficiency with repetitive tasks or to get the first version of anything in your face faster. And those are two of the more challenging things in business.

One, how do I complete seemingly repetitive tasks in my role more consistently? To how do I get the first versions of things done in such a way where I can get to V2, V3 faster? And while AI can do so much more than that, those are two of the areas right now that if I was starting anywhere, I'd start at those two things. What can I automate?

Eliminate, simplify with AI, what can I get to a second version of faster with AI? And there are several uses beyond that, but as leaders, we're really kind of the key ones for adopting it. And while I know there are several risks for AI, the societal, there are several, there are so many sides to this argument, societal risks, personal risks, but right now, if I'm inside of an organization, I need to be thinking, how do I use this technology to get rid of all the little tasks? Because here's the challenge.

One, I will say that the organizations I coach, no one's thinking about using it as a way to get rid of people. What they are thinking about, though, is a way to not have to hire as many people in the future. And that means they want to keep their A-player teams smaller by getting rid of systematic inefficiency And here's the deal. If we have to automate your job for you, odds are you're gonna lose it.

If you automate your job, and I said this for 20 years, even pre-AI, and I will say I'm very happy that my clients share the same philosophy, which is if you automate your job, automate half your job, automate 25% of your job, you will leave us with no choice but to promote you and put you in a better position. So I've been faced with scenarios with team members who refuse to adopt, refuse to use, and that's just putting you, refuse to use AI to improve. And that is just putting you in a worse spot as an employee. I understand you might have very, very personal feelings against AI.

I know there are some societal implications. For some people, there are environmental use implications. There is a lot behind this argument. But as a worker, if we're not embracing it and using it to systematize now, the problem is that there are more people around you than ever that realize that there are efficiency opportunities and effectiveness opportunities by using it.

So I highly recommend embracing it. And if you're part of a leadership team or a CEO, what you really have to do if you want to use or AIFI your organization, and again, you don't want it to take over strategic tasks. What it could do is take over limited tasks, tasks that are repetitive, pointless to do, but just wastes a lot of time or low value tasks is probably a better way to say it. If you want to have this adopted, this isn't something IT does, this is something the leadership team adopts and is the one that sponsors it throughout the organization.

They're the ones that ask their team members, how are they using AI in the last week? And they're the ones that are helping their team members share examples of how it's used throughout the organization. So one of the powerful best practices we've been employing recently is in our weekly leadership team meetings and in our weekly team meetings out from that, it's sharing examples of how people used AI in the last week, because what we find is it's cumulative. If you want to know how to utilize this technology and make it, you know, a powerful tool, you have to be able and willing to share examples of how it's used.

So, for example, I have a client that was able to shave three hours of estimation time for clients. We estimate projects for clients and There was a key part that in the past had to be estimated by hand and someone realized that you could simplify these sort of different conduit sizes down to within minutes by using a spreadsheet loaded into ChatGPT. I have another client that started to do resume reviews. A lot of you know how difficult resume reviews can be and we have some very specific criteria that we use.

If you want to watch my other videos, you'll see what that criteria is. But able to load in that resume criteria and then batch upload. Resumes to chat GPT and only spit out the ones that met that criteria. And that's a very powerful way to automate something that, you know, resume screening can be a very time consuming task.

One of the things that I've done recently is a top grading interview, which used to be done on a forum. I used to write down the answers. One of the things I'll do now is I'll just use my AI chat bot to record the meeting with their permission and we'll go through and record the entire video using the same interview format. And since my handwriting is terrible anyway, happens to be a better use of it.

I get a great set of notes back that I can then look back, refer to, and compare against the scorecards I have for the role to see if this is in fact the correct candidate. But those are just some of many examples. On the strategy front, another great one is I have a client that looked at all the attributes or needs of the market and was able to see how favorably their company was able to that their differentiators currently met those needs of the market and evaluated against a couple of competitors they wanted to de-position. That is a very powerful use of that technology.

Do I know what the long-term implications or even the short-term and medium-term implications of AI are? No. Do I see where, I think it's the CEO of Anthropic said that, you know, it could eliminate a very large percentage of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next couple of years? Yes, because of that potential to eliminate mundane, repetitive tasks.

Are there massive implications to that? Yes, absolutely. Do we need to grapple with that? Yes, but for Teams and companies will either embrace it or sort of be embraced.

So it's here, it's got to be utilized, there's more awareness of it than ever. Adopt and help your teams adopt it effectively to get better at its use.