When you think about AI, what springs to mind?
You’re not alone if you instantly get an image of some dystopian, sci-fi reality where it’s people vs. machines. From The Terminator to The Matrix and endless pixel points in between, we have an idea of what happens when robots get smarter/stronger/faster than us humans.
And it’s not just movies that warp our perspective. Many of my clients are Fortune 500 companies, and I notice that management leaders often fear new technology. After all, tech disrupts the status quo, and that can appear to slow progress.
I get why that can be intimidating, and as a forward-obsessed entrepreneur, I’m here to change that perception.
We all know how everybody’s so damn busy these days. But what if I told you that AI could help you win faster? That it could save you time by helping you make better decisions faster, accelerating your productivity and creativity?
Back in 2011, “internet evangelist” and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, famously said, “software is eating the world.”
And now AI is eating software. There are some exciting things afoot with machine learning. It’s not just a way to process data information.
Of course, you already use AI in everyday life. If you Google anything, boss around Alexa or Siri, open your phone with face ID, check out your social media feeds, use email, have one or more smart appliances in your home, use GPS, get banking alerts, or enjoy Netflix and chilling… well, the machine is already helping you #GetShitDone.
With that in mind, it’s time to consider AI not as competition but as a complement — a partner and co-creative tool that can help eliminate creative blocks so you can ship products faster. The interplay between people and machines is a brilliant space to play in.
Just as AI continuously evolves, we as a society need to evolve. Social media is already rewiring our brains by triggering the release of feel-good brain chemistry, notably dopamine and serotonin. Attention spans are shrinking, and our capacity to take more in faster is increasing.
As a founder devoted to creating transformation and change with your vision and products, you’re, by definition, a positive changemaker. Of course, there are ethical challenges worth exploring… but not in today’s newsletter.
In the next section below, I’ve given you a list of AI-driven tools to help make your business endeavors easier, faster, and more fun.
These tools will allow you to view your business future through the lens of co-creative opportunities and the prism of possibility.
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve likely had your social feeds FILLED with AI-created artwork created with Midjourney, Stablediffusion, or OPENAI’s DALLE•2.
AI is more than a party trick — it’s a whole new wand for you to work your magic.
What’s beautiful about this is that none of these images I created ever existed — they were all in my head, and the AI helped me move that vision into the world.
Think about that: you can now take what you envision and sketch it out. Then you can give this tangible draft to human specialists to develop it into something amazing.
Your opportunities to up-level everything you do are now amplified. For example, here are just a few ways I use AI to save me time every single day:
- Generating content ideas and beating writer’s block: Jasper.ai, Copy.ai, and OpenAI
- Coming up with concept ideas: DALLE•2, StableDiffusion, and Midjourney (I use all three, as they all have their different magic. Wanna know more? Email me, and maybe I’ll write a deeper dive on this for everyone.)
- Taking better notes and being more present in meetings: I rely on Fathom to make my Zoom meetings SUCK less. It takes notes automatically, helps with summarizing and capturing important questions my clients ask, and simplifies follow-ups. It’s like having a notetaker assistant there with me for ZERO cost.
- Creating and editing videos: Make-a-Video and Descript (great for podcast editing, too!)
- TLDR’ing stuff: I often rely on AI to summarize long passages of text to see if I’ll be interested in diving into the piece. Sometimes it’s good to judge a book by its cover. 😉
AI isn’t all bright skies and rainbows. There are TONS of ethics problems, bias, and copyright issues. It’s the Wild Wild West — just as many great things are coming from it, so too are many challenging ones.
Will jobs be eliminated? Yes. Painters and artists were outraged by the dawn of the photograph. Photographers are now outraged by AI-created work. AI will continue to create sweeping changes that affect lives, no doubt.
But now is the time to eliminate dull and dirty jobs for governments, corporations, and communities by waking up to new programs that aid job creation, upskilling, and workforce development. The time to get into people working with robots and cobots and understanding technology’s role in the world is NOW. With global labor shortages at play, this is a bigger opportunity than a disaster.
The brave work and vast investments companies have made in publishing and releasing many of these platforms as open-source democratized the opportunities for people who are not mathematicians or expert machine learning people — folks like you and me.
No industry will be unaffected by AI. This snapshot from CB Insights’ 2022 AI 100 List alone should make you want to dive in deeper. That is if you don’t want to join the dustbin of obsolescence that swept up brands that failed to innovate, like Blockbuster, Eastman Kodak, and Compaq.
If you’re smart (and I know you are), you won’t waste one more minute ignoring or being intimidated by AI. Start right now by taking an hour to goof around on Midjourney. Play with CopyAi. And have some fun — the most human of all traits are creativity and curiosity, and in my experience, these new tools are a blast!
Plus, the more you play in that future-driving sandbox, the bigger the castles you’ll be able to build.
Open AI’s ChatGPT platform is going to go down in history as one of the most disruptive platforms for everything. Yes I said everything.
ChatGPT is the world’s first easy-to-access interface for AI. To give you a sense of the power of this, look at the speed of its adoption. In a matter of days, it crossed the 1M user mark. Yes, in under 5 days. For context on the scale of this adoption, look at the other platforms below,
Reached 1 Million users:
WhatsApp — 2 years
Instagram — 2 years
Facebook — 10 months
ChatGPT — 5 days
The game has changed forever. How are you going to shift your strategy now to win?