As an AI consultancy, we are of course bullish on the use of AI in business. We think it can automate tedious work, help businesses make better decisions and help individuals be more productive.
However, there is one thing which we think is a dangerous trap with AI, and that is in outsourcing your thinking.
I had to write some content this week and bashed it out in ChatGPT. Though the content was good, it felt incredibly unsatisfying to just turn off my brain and bypass the thinking and work.
However, when the choice is between spending 8 hours on a hand crafted report vs 60 seconds on a prompt, it needs a superhuman level of discipline to resist putting AI in the driving seat.
I fear we will lose a lot now that every white collar worker is skipping the thinking for all of their business content - reports, presentations, strategy documents, customer comms etc. Everything will tend towards average and generic and the creativity and opportunities that sit in the gaps will be missed.
It all turns office work into even more of a charade if we are smashing out documents in 60 seconds, pretending they took all day to write, and nobody can be bothered to read them because they’re so generic and wordy.
I think AI has a ton of potential for automation and helping people do their jobs and serve their customers better, but automatically churning out business content is a very dangerous trap to fall into. It’s like giving your entire business a labotomy.