AI as a sparring partner

AI is better used as a sparring partner than strictly a force multiplier.

Try this: go to your favorite LLM and type, "Tell me where I'm holding back."

It'll sting. But it'll also be eye-opening, almost therapeutic.

AI can find patterns in your behavior and work that you're mostly unaware of. It can give you the gift of perspective.

This is the sort of thing AI is particularly good at...spotting patterns and helping you see blind spots you wouldn't have seen before.

This is where there's real opportunity in using AI.

Using it solely for more output is almost negligent.

When you completely hand an entire task off to a machine for the sake of productivity, you also give up the most valuable IP...your thinking.

It's a classic over-correction.

And despite what my old friend Alan Jackson says, too much of a good thing is not a good thing.

See, when we stop wrestling with an idea, it stops being ours.

And what we produce is really just the machine's best guess at what everyone else's collective opinion would be.

It's like mixing so many ingredients together that you lose the art of distinction and flavor.

That's where the interesting shift is happening.

Some of the sharpest work being done with AI right now involves wrestling with it rather than leaning on it.

There's a good interview with Tom Kaneshige from the CMO Council where he gets into using AI to stress-test your team's thinking rather than having it think for them.

He says, "Stop treating AI like a content factory. That's the fastest way to scale sameness."

Couldn't agree more, Tom.

The push-back to that is, it will inevitably slow you down.

Using AI as a sparring partner means being willing to take from quantity to give to quality side of the equation.

That's not a popular use case because it doesn't immediately move charts up and to the right.

But over time, quality always wins.

Scaled execution may look good, but original thinking is what humans connect with and ultimately respond to.

And years down the road, people won't be impacted by how productive you were.

They will, however, remember the connection you made because you did the work of wrestling to a revelation.