AI: Your Job, Your Future

Last month, I reviewed one of Chris’s favorite books, Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. We hope you’ll read our brief review; we recommend this book! In short, unlike other technology shifts, AI isn’t about learning new software, finding out how best to use it, then adding it to your tool belt. For most software, you enter the same commands or series of information and you’ll get the same result. When it comes to AI, that’s not the case at all! Enter the same thing three times and you’ll have three different responses. Rather than a series of 0’s and 1’s, AI is all about stringing information together based on a VAST amount of data input by a VAST amount of resources.

The focus for technology efficiencies over the last decades has been to optimize and sometimes replace lower-level jobs. This has greatly increased accuracy, efficiency, safety, and the ability to perform more meaningful work. I still remember many years ago when the red train caboose was slated to go away and there was an uproar for those who would lose jobs. The counter argument was for those employees to learn how to maintain the new equipment and surrounding technology which would now open new jobs! Another example is the switchboard operators, often women, who were replaced with new telephone equipment. Can you imagine if we were still manually routing calls because some jobs were at risk? I can’t imagine that was very fulfilling work, either.

Fast forward to the AI wave and it’s a different conversation. Since these AI models are very useful in providing creative titles for articles, content for marketing, consolidation of large data models, summarizing large documents, analysis of medical images, troubleshooting programming code, drafting code to solve problems, and high-level analysis, it’s actually the higher-knowledge worker jobs that are ‘at risk.’

So what does this mean to our Construction Industry and related IT needs? There’s definitely an opportunity to go down the ‘half empty’ road, taking the path of a scarcity mindset. But, this is also a chance to explore some new opportunities and re-think how to use this new technology to leverage our businesses.

Darren Hardy had a few things to say about this (as we would expect!). He’s not alone as he points out some great possibilities for all of us. AI can amplify an employee’s existing skills! Start with the human strategy which would be the first 30% of effort, add AI horsepower for another 40% of effort, then back to the human for refinement and the last 30% to bring it over the finish line!

By taking some of the time and tasks off the human, the human is available for more human connections! If AI was putting together marketing campaigns, reading and summarizing contracts, gathering research, and more, that would free up time to get in front of humans! Visiting job sites, visiting suppliers, meeting and participating with clients, engaging with employees, sending hand notes, making those personal phone calls, none of which can be replaced by AI. (Even as I type this last one, I know that the AI Deep Fakes can be pretty good, but they’re usually in the hands of bad actors!)

Here are some other thoughts. There are new careers on their way! How about an AI Prompt Engineer or AI Query Writer. Think about the many jobs we have now that weren’t around even 50 years ago. We’re just at the beginning of the AI wave. There are many opportunities ahead. With the use of AI, many of us have been promoted from a member of the orchestra to the Conductor! Instead of doing the tasks that when combined make the magic happen, we have AI to do the tasks and we are orchestrating the end result!

A caution I’m hearing everywhere about where to apply AI. If you have broken systems with poor results, applying AI means you’ll magnify what you have! We have to have good systems and structure in the first place. If you take a bad marketing campaign and apply AI to triple the volume, you’ll have triple the bad results! We are tasked to find what works, then leverage AI to set it on fire!

In summary: Automate the ordinary; leverage the human factor for amazing results; step in to the Conduct the orchestra; consider new roles that require new expertise related to AI; perfect the old stuff that works then supercharge with AI. Invite AI to the table and be sure you’re paying attention! –CMW