AI tools are helping people who work with words be super productive. Create a document? You can ask AI to do it. Summarize a call? Yep, AI has it. Don't know what to say to a disgruntled customer? There's an AI for that.
All this sounds good, right? Makes you more productive, you can do more with less! No question about it. Despite all this greatness and awesome productivity gains, there continues to be this discomfort running down my spine. I know something is not right; but, what could it be?
What dawned on me is the high-impact the decision to use or not to use AI in your day-to-day work (again, if your work primarily deals in ideas and words) can have. Too little use of AI, and you start to lag in performance, as everyone else is expecting you to produce faster (for example, I am typing this without AI). Too much use of AI and it creates a massive crutch, one which you would need to perform the most rudimentary task (as an example, you can build your entire website content with AI).
What I call noise is what happens when you are in this balance point. How much AI to use? Why kinds of support do I need? What tools are the best for this? What happens if I don’t use AI? This noise is out there and no one is helping us deal with it, making it manageable in our daily lives.
Would medical doctors using AI to help in diagnoses begin to forget how to structure their thoughts from scratch? Radiologists are going through something like this now. Do doctors need to know how the body works to be able to diagnose if AI tools show everything they need to know? Is similar to asking: Do I need to know how a calculator works in order to use it? I don’t know.
We use AI in Founder Sherpa to help Scientist Founders (e.g. Postdocs and PhD. Students) who want to spin-out companies out of academic work define and test key assumptions about the market and customers who benefit from their technology. The goal is to converge on viable use-cases faster than otherwise be possible through a manual process.