ON BUSINESS || AI Isn't Here to Take Your Job
AI isn't here to take your job.
AI tools are not here to replace you; they're here to empower you. Similar to what happened during the past several technological leaps, going back as far as transitioning from a horse carriage to a car, or the Industrial Revolution where we moved from people-powered to machine-powered, or the arrival of the iPhone, which changed the game for media…AI is simply the next wave.
AI tools enhance the speed at which you can get things done, allowing you to accomplish more in less time. My interpretation and interaction with AI tools is that it frees up a lot of time for me to focus on more strategic tasks that require brainpower. I’m not being busy for the sake of. I’ve spoken with other business owners about the power of these tools, yet those in middle management or even in director-level positions have expressed that their companies are reluctant to adopt them because then they are faced with an HR problem. What do they do with all the administrative staff that they’ve made redundant with AI? The obvious answer would be to upskill them, but even then, depending on how much work is available, they may still have to lay off people, because there’s just not enough work to go around. Another potential issue is that the current staff handling administrative duties do not want to be upskilled. Change isn’t for everyone.
For boutique agencies like mine, it’s slightly easier for us to move fast, implement changes and have open discussions about how we will integrate AI and how it will impact each person’s job. Our team uses AI to streamline and automate workflows and eliminate redundant tasks (think note-taking, spreadsheet populating...). This has freed up more time for us to work on things that require more brainpower and expertise. Here are a few ways they've helped us:
Contribute to our brainstorming sessions for marketing concepts. Let's face it. Some of ChatGPT's ideas could be better, but some are decent, and you could build off them. And now that ChatGPT has memory enabled across chats, it means that if you give feedback to indicate which ideas you think are valuable, it could retain that information to generate better ideas next time.
I've cloned my voice using an AI tool called ElevenLabs so my team can create voiceovers for social media content even when I'm not there.
We can create social media content with text-to-video prompts to make content creation much faster. Of course, there's still some editing, but simply having the segments, music and transitions laid out saves a ton of time.
We had people DM us on TikTok asking whether we had a newsletter they could subscribe to. We didn't, but within a week, we were able to hack various AI tools together to create an automated newsletter on Mailchimp we could send to our subscribers.
A simple one is where I could now expand the boundaries of my photos by extending the canvas using new AI features in photo editing apps.
It's given to people who have always wished they could 'visualize' their ideas as an outlet. You can enter a text prompt and watch your vision come to life. How cool is that?
The list goes on, and I'm tired on a Friday, so this is by no means exhaustive. However, from personal experience, I've seen mostly benefits from all the AI tools that have come to market. Freeing up my team's time from mundane tasks and allowing them to focus on creative tasks that require them to activate their strategic mindset has increased motivation and satisfaction. Who wants to populate a spreadsheet all day? Overall, my team is happier that they can reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks.
Sure, there was a flood of AI companies hoping to make a quick buck when the AI wave started taking off. Still, there have already been dropoffs because the big guys (think Apple, OpenAI, Adobe) launched AI features on their hardware and software, effectively killing off many players hoping to piggyback off OpenAI. AI will eventually become standard in our everyday, and it will just make everything smarter and easier to use and understand. So, I see efficiency in the mid-term; for my long-term guess on what AI could become...go read Stowaway on Mars, a fascinating and short read by John Wyndham.
