I’ve been on a tear this week, talking about AI. I’m so excited about it’s potential, yet I get so frustrated about too many of the current use cases. We are obsessed with how many tasks can be automated by AI, freeing up our time. Without a doubt, AI can have a huge impact on how we spend our time, offloading meaningless tasks. (As a sidenote, so much of the early results of these efforts, don’t seem to show improvements in results, at least in our GTM strategies.).
But I worry this obsession with automating tasks/processes might cause us to lose sight of where the real power of AI might be. But automation automates the known. Even agentic AI isn’t changing the work, it’s changing who does the work.
So I wanted to consider a thought experiment.
What if AI couldn’t do anything in offloading tasks and freeing up time? Imagine AI not having that capability, how would we use AI?
In doing this, we discard the use cases of writing emails for us, updating CRM, publishing meeting notes/follow-ups, doing all our call planning and research, managing our social feeds. Again, I’m not advocating against these things, I’m just asking you to think, if AI couldn’t do this how would we leverage AI. Stated differently, if all the “work” was still left in human hands, what would we use AI for?
Now we start thinking about new use cases,
- How can we engage AI in helping us rethink, simplify, and repurpose our sales processes?
- How can we engage AI in helping brainstorm, simulate, and reinvent our GTM strategies?
- How can we more effectively design collaborative conversations with our customers?
- How can we build our business, customer, and financial acumen so that we can engage our customers in higher impact conversations?
- How can we help our customers innovate? How can we better innovate within our own organizations?
- How can we “red team” our sales strategies, strengthening our positioning with customers?
- What might we look for to expand our share of customer and share or market? How might we imagine those possibilities, how might we assess risk, what are things we can do to grow in different ways?
- How can we rethink the experience we create for our people, our customers, our partners, our communities? How can we build stronger organizations, create greater value, do new things?
I’ll stop here, but there is no end of possibility. But within this thought experiment, we are not using AI to do the work for us, to automate the stuff we currently do. In this thought experiment, we will be doing all the work that is the outcome of the thought experiment.
What this does is helps us look at everything we do differently. It is not about doing what we do faster or letting AI do it for us, it is about reimagining what we are doing. It is helping us think about what we might do differently. It is helping us think about how we grow in new areas, expand in new markets, engage our people and customers in new ways.
While there is much power in automating work and huge opportunities for agentic AI; these focus on doing things more efficiently or untouched by human hands. But they don’t force us to think of things differently, imagining whole new possibilities. And this is where I think the real opportunities on leveraging AI are.
I’ve been experimenting, by myself and with others. We are just scratching the surface of how we can leverage these AI thought partners in different ways. With how little we have already done, I can barely contain my excitement for the possibilities we have yet do discover.
Afterword: This is the AI generated discussion this post. There are a few parts of the discussion I disagree with, but it’s an interesting POV.
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