The ABCs of AI

I recently talked with my friend, Kian Gohar, about AI and how it can help us be more creative in the workplace. He also shared how AI can help us find better solutions to problems we face at work.

Kian began with the idea that AI is MORE than a search engine, and how we can use it to increase creativity in solving challenges. He told me about an experiment with real teams at real companies around the world who had real problems. Half the teams were given access to AI, and the other half did not have access to AI. They found that the teams who had access to AI only had modest gains in creativity, which was surprising. As Kian and his colleagues dug into it, they found that we humans are biased to settle for the first acceptable answer that we get, and AI is really good at giving us an acceptable answer. But that doesn’t mean it is the best answer.

Kian found was that there were some teams in the experiment who were really creative when they were using AI; they were totally different than the other teams who also had access to AI. What they discovered is that these teams changed their workflow and their behavior of how they interacted with AI.

Have a Conversation

Instead of simply asking AI a question like you do on any search engine, the teams who got creative with AI had a back-and-forth conversation, and that led them to deeper, creative solutions to the problems they were facing.

Kian realized that if you want to use AI to be creative in your problem solving, you must learn to use it as a thought partner – as a conversation partner and learn how to interact with it differently than we have been doing for the last 20+ years of the Internet era.

We are accustomed to sitting at a laptop or computer, going to a search engine with a box, and we think about the perfect question to put into the box to get the exact answer we think the search engine is going to give us.

The user interface for AI typically looks like all the search engines we’ve been using. So when we go into AI, and see a ‘search box’ we try to figure out the exact prompt to then be able to get the right kind of answer. Instead, Kian suggests that we think about having a voice conversation with AI, rather than typing it into the app. Have a regular, normal conversation. AI has the capabilities to understand that extremely well and when you start having conversation back and forth, you get significantly more insights and ideas.

Give Context

Kian said that one of the most important lessons about having a conversation with AI is that we must give it context for whatever dilemma we are trying to solve. If you don’t know what kind of context to give, he recommends that we hack the behavior of how we interact with AI.

Ask AI to interview you for the context it needs to get you the right kind of answer. You might say, “Hey AI, ask me five questions about this situation or topic before you give me any answers.” And that gives AI an opportunity to ask you questions and interview you for enough context that it needs to begin a conversation. And then you can go back and forth, you can push, you can challenge. You can ask it to move in a different direction, assess some of your assumptions. And that type of conversation, just like you would have with another person, is how you can engage with AI to get to significantly better answers.

It is important to get fluent in the fundamentals of AI – Kian calls it the ABCs of AI. Anytime you learn a new language, you learn the alphabet of that language. Now that we have AI as tool, we need to learn some of the basics, the fundamentals, the ABCs. This will help demystify how we interact with AI, rather than thinking that we have to be technical experts. Because this is all about how humans and AI interact in the future, rather than thinking about it as a technical solution.

You can download the ABCs of AI at Kian’s website: LearnABC.ai

You can listen to our conversation here.