How To Thrive in the AI Era, Pt 1
Learn AI, Use AI, Leverage AI, Build AI, Monetize AI
As your intrepid correspondent in this AI Revolution, I am reading and learning about AI research, AI models and AI applications, and keeping up on the AI news every day. I do this to inform you about what AI is, what’s happening with AI now, and where AI is going. Why do this? My mission is to help you thrive in the AI era.
That’s all well and good, but it occurred to me that I have not done enough to address the question head-on: How can you thrive in the AI era? How can you take advantage of AI to be more productive and successful? How to make money and live better with AI?
To thrive in the AI era, let’s go step-by-step: Learn AI, Use AI, Leverage AI, Build AI, and Monetize AI.
The AI Era Thesis - AI Changes Everything
We are on the edge of the biggest technology revolution that has ever existed. - Elon Musk
To understand the path forward in the AI era, it’s most helpful to grasp where we are currently and have a map of the terrain. Some fundamental points about AI:
We are in the early stages of the AI Era. ChatGPT’s release in late 2022 took the world by storm, and 2023 was the inflection point for the AI Era. We have just begun; AI will get keep getting better.
We are in the era of foundation generative AI models. Foundation AI Models, in particular multi-modal LLMs, are the basis of AI agents and AI applications.
Current AI models are still in their ‘early steam engine’ days. Both their efficiency and capability are rapidly improving, and there is significant potential for further scaling and efficiency gains.
Natural language prompts are becoming the primary interface for interacting with AI applications, transforming how we engage with computer applications.
Current state-of-the-art AI is already changing the world. We don’t need AGI or super-human intelligence. Generative AI that creates content, answers queries, automates workflows, transforms industries, and improves our lives tremendously is already here.
The AI Opportunity
There are differing perspectives on the risks, implications and speed of AI progress. We discuss these perspectives and risks elsewhere (see this article on AI testing and trust instead.) Here, we focus on opportunities.
It’s best to be humble and open-minded about how AI technology will develop and evolve, both its speed and directions. We simply don’t know.
The rise of AI in the 2020s can be compared to the rise of the internet in the 1990s. The internet gave rise to to new technology stacks (Internet ISPs, DNS, WiFi, and cloud data-centers); upended and displaced business models and industries (like the newspaper), while creating whole new ones (like e-commerce).
Similarly, the AI wave is driving the development of new infrastructure, such as powerful GPUs, LLM API inference served from GPU-enabled data centers, AI frameworks like LangChain, and vector databases. AI is enabling new interfaces, such as voice-enabled intelligent chatbots. Entirely new AI applications and business models are emerging.
AI is particularly impactful at the intersection of creativity and productivity. The production of ideas and their artifacts - words, video, audio, marketing materials, documentation, software, research papers, press releases - all can be automated or at least AI-infused. AI is poised to disrupt many types of knowledge-based work.
Learn To Thrive
If you look at this AI disruption in fear, consider the good news: AI cannot yet displace most professionals. Rather, AI can augment our activities, making us more productive.
You will not be replaced by AI. You will either leverage AI to be more productive, or, if not, get outpaced by those who do.
The first step in taking advantage of AI is understanding AI.
Just as a good car owner should know how an engine works and how to maintain it, e.g., why it needs engine oil, so too it’s important to understand generative AI as a tool and technology. For example, understanding LLMs as ‘word calculators’ gives insight as to why it might hallucinate and how to avoid that.
It doesn’t hurt to stay on top of AI news, products, and research, as AI is rapidly changing and improving. So subscribe, comment, share and ask questions. It’s the best way to keep learning.
Use AI Every Day
Learning about AI is no different than learning to ride a bike, learning to browse the internet, or learning to code. You learn by doing. The best way to learn how AI works is to simply use AI. So use AI every day.
Learning AI by doing AI is the easiest thing you can do with AI, since a chatbot interface is natural and intuitive. All mistakes are forgivable; if your prompt yields a response that’s not helpful, try to prompt it a different way.
Be a curious AI user: Now is a good time to have a ‘hacker’ mentality and try different things out. Be curious. Try new things once or twice, see what works, keep various tools available and try multiple ones. (I keep Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Poe, Perplexity, and more on hand.) Don’t be tied to one AI model or one way of using the AI.
Learn prompting: Learn how to prompt for best results. Prompt engineering may or may remain an important skill as AI models evolve, but crafting good prompts is for now important to getting the most out of AI. LLMs are like other types of software: your inputs determine your outputs.
Make AI a part of daily workflows: AI can serve as a great time-saver for repeated activities; you can started by simply taking any task you do more repeatedly and ask “How can AI help me?” For example, you could have an AI assistant like Gemini summarize recent emails in your inbox, saving you time and allowing you to focus and follow up on important items with less distraction.
Understanding how to use AI effectively is essential to boosting your productivity and creativity with AI. Regular practice, experimentation, and immersion in AI's capabilities will position you to leverage AI more fully.
Leverage AI to 10x Your Productivity
AI sits at the intersection of productivity and creativity. AI is a productivity-enhancing technology for many types of knowledge work: software development, data science, data analysis, customer service, technical trouble-shooting, and more.
Productivity will undoubtedly increase due to AI. To stay ahead of this curve, you will need to use AI to automate work tasks and personal tasks alike. Learning and using AI will lead you naturally to utilizing AI to automating tasks and boosting your productivity.
Using AI as a personal assistant can enhance your personal productivity:
Automate Repetitive Tasks: AI can take over repetitive ‘clerical’ tasks, such as reviewing emails, catching up on news, managing daily calendars, etc. This eases our information distraction overload and frees up time for more strategic and creative work.
Time Management with AI: AI can remind you of tasks and deadlines, handle appointment scheduling, coach you on your routines, and organize your day to keep you on track. AI analysis of past performance could be used to make personalized recommendations for more effective time management.
Writing productivity: AI models excel at writing content for articles, reports, marketing materials, books, emails, and more. (Claude 3 is especially good.) AI can be your co-pilot for drafting, reviewing, polishing and formatting; this streamlines the writing process while you maintain control over the final output.
The AI research gopher: AI models with long context windows can digest large document sets (e.g., legal briefs, research papers, technical documents, software codebases) and then summarize, augment, and answer questions about them. This can save huge amounts of time. Whether you are an academic, engineer, scientist, legal assistant, or just trying to find an informational needle in a haystack, AI is your gopher.
The AI advisor and ideation: You can prompt AI “Give me a list of 10 ideas for …” to generate lists of ideas for any topic or challenge you're working on. Whether you need birthday gift ideas, presentation outline, new product concepts, or how to ask a boss for a raise, etc. AI can be your ideation buddy, giving you helpful novel ideas and creative sparks.
These five AI use paradigms - task automation, time management, writing, research, and ideation - apply to business workflows within various specific domains.
You can tailor AI to augment and automate ideation, writing, research, time management, and other tasks in your professional fields domain’s workflows. As a result, you can greatly improve professional productivity with AI:
Creatives - Design and Art creation: AI can assist artists, designers, and architects by generating novel designs, patterns, visual concepts, branding assets, and more in various forms like text, wireframes, images, videos, and 3D models. AI tools are improving to support consistent character designs, branded assets, and visual identities.
Writers - Writing and Content Generation: AI writing assistants are invaluable tools for bloggers, authors, journalists, and content creators, but anyone who has a writing task can use AI to help them.
Analysts - Data Analysis and Insights: ChatGPT’s ‘data analyst’ capability allows the AI model to create and run data analysis code on the fly. AI can process large datasets, identify patterns, run various analyses, and predict trends - essentially serving as a data analyst in your pocket for business intelligence, financial analysis, scientific research, and more.
Service organizations - Automated Customer Support: Chatbots powered by generative AI can handle customer inquiries, take orders, troubleshoot issues, and more. AI can triage many customer issues, cut costs, and provide instant responses, making this an area ripe for AI-driven automation.
Creativity in Writing, Music and Film: Generative AI tools can compose music, generate lyrics, write poetry, create images and videos, and integrate other art forms. AI can boost the creative process for writers and composers, serving as a ‘creative co-pilot’ by brainstorming ideas, drafting, fleshing out concepts.
Software developers - Code Generation and Debugging: Developers can leverage AI to write code snippets, generate test cases, identify bugs, and debug issues. Pietro Schirano on X suggests GPT-4 for analyzing code but Claude 3 for generating code. AI co-pilots are already essential to software development, and programming is being further automated with AI Agents.
Educators - AI as tutor: Generative AI has very useful applications in education, both for students (although it can be misused for plagiarism), and for teachers. AI-based tutoring applications that personalize learning experiences to the student have great potential. In the meantime, teachers can use AI assistants for course development, grading, generating quizzes and materials, and more.
While we could discuss other industries specifically, the core patterns of AI usage are similar across most fields. All creativity and knowledge work can get an AI assist. AI companies are developing various AI applications for specific industries and verticals, such as law, healthcare, retail, etc. so be aware of what’s available for your specific needs. Being a pro-active AI adopter will keep you on the leading edge.
AI and the 10X life
You will not be replaced by AI. You will either leverage AI to be more productive, or, if not, get outpaced by those who do.
Was I serious that AI can 10X your productivity? Yes.
Most professionals that do creative or knowledge work spend the majority of their work time in these types of tasks: Research, writing, ideation, repetitive tasks, and planning / time management. Automating the mundane aspects of these tasks will greatly increase productivity.
Furthermore, what AI can automate, AI can scale. The industrial revolution enabled massive productivity increases by using power to automate certain tasks and then building manufacturing processes that scaled those tasks. AI likewise can automate certain tasks and increase speed and cut the cost of those tasks by orders-of-magnitude. Scaling around AI-automated tasks will yield large productivity gains.
What tasks could you automate? What could you 10X when those tasks cost you zero effort? If AI agents can automate a cold call, you can scale that and focus on down-stream marketing to 10x your marketing funnel. An AI agent for research can automate research data collection and analysis; you can scale that to accelerate research, increase its scope, and focus on higher-level broader insights.
Using information technologies to automate and refactor workflows has been going on for decades in the business world (consider the 1990s business book “Reengineering the Corporation” that explored this trend.)
What’s different now? AI is sending it into over-drive. AI is able to automate ever more complex tasks and processes. As it does so, we can and will accelerate business workflows and increase productivity by an order of magnitude.
Productivity is about more than tools and technologies. It’s about the mindset to learn and adapt to new ways of doing things and the skillset to use them effectively. Having the mindset to learn AI and use AI effectively will give you the skillset to leverage AI for productivity gains.
So, adopt the mindset to keep learning and using AI, and through that you’ll gain from leveraging AI to benefit your day-to-day personal and professional life. That’s how you can ride the AI wave and thrive in the AI era.
Next Up …
We have talked about being a user of AI for your personal and professional benefit. But wait, there’s more. In Part Two, we will talk about how you can take advantage of the AI revolution by building AI and monetizing AI, aka “Who wants to Be An AI Millionaire?”