My friend, Charlie Green, and I exchange ideas on new AI tools. This weekend, he shared a tool that summarizes all the newsletters he subscribes to. Both he and I tend to subscribe to a lot of things. Inevitably, it gets overwhelming. I can’t read everything I subscribe to.
Tools like the one Charlie referenced help us deal with that overwhelm.
Everyday, I get inundated with the lists of all the things that AI can do. Recently a guru posted a list of current use cases for AI. To be fair, he didn’t claim it to be all inclusive, but he identified 46 areas in selling/GTM for AI. Since that article is 4 days old, I suspect others are claiming far more use cases.
It’s stunning to see the things these tools can do, all in the name of efficiency, and simplifying our work. Automatic call summaries/annotation, even follow up. Research, prep, outreach, presentations, call plans, scripts, you name it.
And then, once we do those things, AI will identify action plans, next steps, and so forth.
Even in our private lives, AI arranges our shopping lists, meal plans, workouts, schedules.
It is truly remarkable what these tools can do in doing the work for us, in saving us the effort.
I reflect and wonder, “To what end?”
As I think to Charlie and my discussion on summarizing the newsletters, I thought, “Wouldn’t a better solution be to unsubscribe to a bunch? If we don’t have the time to read all that we’ve subscribed to, why not cull our lists, freeing up time to dive more deeply into the most important newsletters that remain?
If I look at the skyrocketing set of tools we can use in selling/GTM, we invest huge amounts of time training these tools to do everything for us, seldom asking the question, “What if we stopped or changed some of the things these tools are helping us on?”
These tools help us do more, but do we really need to be doing more, or do we need to do things differently? Or even, do we need to stop doing things?
Then I start thinking about, “What do we lose when we start relying on these tools?”
When I was in college, one of the big cheats all of us did, particularly for our literature classes, were Cliff Notes. These would reduce a 400 page piece of classic literature to about a 30 page summary. They provided just enough so we might be able to answer some questions in a class or an exam.
But we missed huge amounts with Cliff Notes. We missed the richness of how the author built the characters, developed the story, the depth of the conversations, the emotions and thinking the writing elicited.
There’s so much more to a great novel, than characters, plot, ironic twist, outcome.
And that’s what so many of these tools, intended to “help” us lose.
In our conversations with our customers, team members, colleagues, partners, the real meaning is less in the words that are exchanged. There’s so much in how they are said, they underlying emotions, and body language.
If one subscribes to some variant of the 7-38-55 rule, 7% is the words that are said, 38% is the way they are said, 55% is the body language surrounding those. Then you imagine how this is compounded in a group meetings/conversation.
We accurately, characterize so much of AI and Agentic solutions as “bots,” missing the human connection.
Then there is another view, do we actually use the things these tools provide?
I’ve been recording all our virtual conversations for years. I’ve gigabytes of recordings, transcriptions, summaries. How often do I use these? How often do the other participants use these? Even if these are uploaded into CRM, how often do we actually go back and review them?
The most important notes from every call and meeting are still those I write down. I may capture a few key issues that arise, opinions that are expressed. I capture agreements and next steps. And there are always a few additional things that are important that would never show up in a transcript or summary. Someone may have said something and in provoked a thought about something I should do.
Before moving on, science has also showed us the act of writing things down ourselves enables us to internalize and learn things far more than having it done for us. Handwriting still remains superior to keyboards, but any kind of purposeful capture has a greater impact.
So yes, AI can do the mechanics of capturing, transcribing, summarizing, developing follow ups. But it cannot capture meaning, so I won’t surrender my note taking.
We’re also seeing another category of tools, those that listen into our conversations, in real time, and try to put words into our mouths. Otherwise known as real time call guidance. Forget, for a moment, the accuracy of these observations, let’s just focus on the distraction this real time “coaching” provides.
In any conversation, we have to be fully present. Distractions have a huge adverse impact on our ability to connect with others. Whether it’s our devices vibrating in our pockets, an alert on an app, or being distracted by too many screens open on our computers. So now, we allow ourselves to be distracted from being fully engaged.
And now, presumably everyone involved in a conversation, is distracted by bots trying to put words in their mouths, rather than being totally present in the conversation.
These tools provide tremendous capabilities. But we have to be cautious, do we really want the help these tools offer us?
Afterword: Here is the AI based discussion of this post. This is one of the rare times when the conversation is far superior to the ideas I present in this post. Take the time to listen to this stunning discussion. (And also recognize these are AI characters talking about themselves).
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