I struggled, perhaps still am, with the title of this post. I am alternating between the current title and:
- TL;DR;DC–Too Long; Didn’t Read; Don’t Care
- Automating Ineffectiveness
- Stop The Insanity!
- What Are We Automating? Why Are We Wasting Our Time Doing That?
There were a few more, but you get the point.
I read article after article about tricks and hacks that save us time, make us more efficient, allow us to do more. (hold that last piece in your minds, the “allow us to do more,” is possibly the most interesting.)
We leverage AI to write and send our emails. They can hyper “personalize” these emails, do it far more efficiently than we can. Forget the “personalization” is rather bland and impersonal. AI saves us the time we would normally spent in sending 1000s of emails. But we never ask ourselves the question, is doing more “personalized” emails the right answer? Even before we started using AI to do the work for us, we had automation tools enabling us to send 100s and 1000s a day. At the same time, we’ve seen response rates and opens plummet!
Oh, I forgot about that! While we are using AI to amp up the volume and “personalization” of emails, we are simultaneously using these tools to scan our emails, delete, manage, respond, summarize them—so we don’t have to “waste our time reading emails!”
Somehow, we can’t make the connection! The emails we send must be important because they are important to us! And it’s important for us to send 1000s of these. At the same time, we look at our inboxes, thinking, “Most of this is unimportant and irrelevant, I don’t want to waste my time!”
You can see why I’m about to pull my hair out! This is insanity!
But let me stick to emails, a bit longer. I probably receive more than my fair share of emails, particularly bad emails. My email address is widely known, I’m reasonably visible in various social channels, I’m active in conferences. I receive 100s of emails a day. My spam filters manage a huge amount–you know the daily nonsense from the same senders that is both bad and totally irrelevant. I only know about those because once a day I spend a minute—60 seconds—skimming the spam box to make sure something important isn’t in there.
That means, over 100 get into my inbox, every day.
When I skim those, the titles and senders allow me to quickly delete or spam a large number of them. It takes me about 5 minutes a day to do this. I don’t want AI to summarize them for me, because I never intend to read them. Of course, AI could manage those and delete them for me—giving me back 5 minutes in the day! Wow!! Impressive!!! Yeah some of you will say, “Dave, that mounts up to about 21 hours a year!” Yeah, yeah, I get it. It’s not a problem, I waste more time walking to the bathroom, or getting cups of coffee, solve that problem for me. Tell me how I can get AI to pee for me, that will save huge amounts of time!
So then I’m left with around 50-75 emails that are, to varying degrees, important to me. And then people say, “But AI can summarize those for you! You don’t have to read them!” But the point is I want to and need to read them! I need to understand them, think about and reflect on them.
A large number are emails, from prospects, “Dave, I’m interested in the ideas you emailed me…..” I want to read what they are saying so I can do the appropriate follow up. Perhaps an email response, perhaps a call, perhaps, “Can we meet?” Just a quick example, Friday I got an email from a prospect, it was in follow up to a conversation we had. It was a thoughtful email, he provided some charts, some ideas. I wanted to read the whole thing. I wanted to read the whole thing because what was important was not just the words and charts he sent, but I could begin to understand his thinking in his response.
A large number of emails are from clients, largely about the work we are doing in a project. I want to/I need to read these emails, study them and understand them. I need to reflect on them and what it means for the next steps of the project. And I want them to do the same for the emails I send them.
Actually, AI sitting in my inbox is wasting my time. Every time I open an email, something pops up, “Do you want me to summarize this for you?” And I have to take the time to close that pop-up. Somehow, increasingly, AI is desperate to give me help on the things I don’t want it’s help on.
And I could go through all sorts of other things that AI does for us, in the spirit of saving us time.
One of the things is it summarizes meetings and transcripts for us. This is an interesting one. It’s actually not saving me time, it’s taking more time. But I’ve seen this can be important. Before I, I had to rely on my notes and memory to summarize and remember the important things. I still take notes and think about what happened. But now, I have transcripts–actually, I’ve had them for years, but I never listened to/read them–I had everything important to me in my own notes. But now AI is summarizing, making observations, and recommendations. I take the time to look at them, making sure I didn’t miss anything. They give me new ideas. So AI isn’t saving me time, it’s consuming it, but in ways that I choose to and that are important to me.
But here’s the “gotcha” on that. I talk to too many people, asking “Are you looking at and using the AI summaries at all? Are you using those to help you think about the next steps and what to do?” The majority of responses I get are, “No I never look at them, they take too much of my time……” Then I ask, “Why are you recording the conversations, why are you getting the transcripts, why are you getting the summaries, if you don’t use them?” Usually by that time, people are bored with my question and want to move on. I suspect they know they can see it in the transcript summary.
I’ll look at one more area in this “Stop the insanity” rant.
This morning I read a fascinating article: Welcome to Your Job Interview. Your Interviewer Is AI.
It talks about how companies are using AI to screen and interview candidates. And I’m certain that many are using these tools for the complete interviewing and hiring process–not wasting the time of managers in making sure they have the best people.
Maybe, I’m just not with it, but I don’t get it! Why are we using these tools for these interviews?
Some would respond, “Well we get 1000s of applications for those roles. We can’t possibly take the time to go through and interview every one. So we have AI do it for us….” Oops, I forgot, the people seeking these interviews and applying for the jobs are using AI to do all the work for them. They don’t want to do the work, they don’t have time to the research, submit an application. Now they can get AI to do it for them, so then can now send 1000s of applications and requests for interviews…..
Perhaps I should have titled this post, “Vicious cycles….”
I’ve hired 1000s of people in my career. I’ve interviewed 1000s more. Of course I don’t want to waste my time in meaningless interviews. I’ve never wanted or needed 1000s of applications. I want, maybe, the top 50 to 100. I never interview those top 50-100, perhaps I narrow it to 10-15. Yes, I’ve used recruiters or people on my staff to screen these. Of course I could would leverage AI to help with this. But I would never outsource the interview process.
The interview process is less about what they say, but more about how they say it. It’s about reading between the lines to understand who they are as people, whether they fit. It’s as much about whether we are the right choice for them, as it is if they are the right choice for us. Sometimes, the best insights in an interview may come from the “wrong” answers.
Early in this post, I highlighted the issue, “AI allows us to do more,” as perhaps the most critical thing we need to think about.
As you’ve read my ramblings/rants, so much of the focus of what we are doing and why we do it focus on the mechanics of the process. It focuses on, “How do we reduce/eliminate those mechanics? How do we make it more efficient take less time?”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against being efficient, it’s what we are choosing to be efficient at that’s the problem.
This is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing that we can possibly do–yet we seem to double down every day on these things.
We never confront the issues, Are we doing the right things? What if we changed what we are doing? Do we even need to be doing those things? Is there a better way?
We are STUCK in the past, in the way we have always done things. We see those things are failing increasingly, and our response is to do more, not to think of doing things differently or even not at all. So we revel in the use of AI to help us ramp up this insanity!
We get so caught up in the mechanics of the things, that we have forgotten what’s really important, the meaning of what we are doing.
Why are we doing these things? Why are they important to us? What do they mean, how do we learn, grow, become fulfilled?
And those same issues apply to everyone we engage, they are thinking of the same things–only from their point of view. Whether it’s our people, our peers, our customers, our partners, each of them is seeking meaning.
And it’s in those discussions of meaning where all the messiness happens. It’s where the true breakthroughs and “Aha” moments occur. It’s where the alignment begins, new ideas are inspired and we learn how we move forward together.
Meaning is so critical in our work and our lives. It is the underlying thing that makes the work, the effort worth doing. It connects us to our larger purpose, forcing us to think less about what we do, but why we are doing it and why it matters—to us, to the people we work with, to our customers.
It is through meaning that we connect with each other, enabling us to create meaning for them and they for us. It’s the foundation of trust. It’s what causes us to change and enables us to help others change. When we lose that meaning, what we do, our work, no longer matters–to anyone!
Ironically, AI can help us with that, as well. It can’t create meaning, but we can use it to help us think differently. We can use it as a debate partner, helping us discover new ideas, which we can leverage in our conversations with others. It can help us accelerate our growth, our learning and engage people in new thinking and new ways.
My feeds are filled with “AI is taking your/our jobs!” It isn’t, we are giving our jobs to them! We are so focused on the mechanics of our jobs, thinking that’s what it is about, that we are forcing our jobs onto AI. And if that is what our jobs are all about–simply the mechanics with no meaning, no connection, then we should be overjoyed in surrendering our jobs, our paychecks, our future to AI.
Perhaps the real danger isn’t that AI is taking our jobs, it’s that we have forgotten why our jobs mattered in the first place!
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion this post To be honest, I’m struggling a little with posting this discussion. They get it–but not quite. Ironically, because of the content of this post, they are capturing some of the mechanics, but losing the meaning. And, perhaps, the only reason to listen to this, is that it vividly illustrates what I am talking about in this post. But to be fair, towards the end, they do start getting on track. So be forewarned, it is an intriguing discussion to listen to, perhaps not for what I had originally hoped. Enjoy!
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