As the rate of AI development continues to accelerate, many of us are feeling increasingly pressured to “adopt it or get left behind.” But fretting over the speed with which you deploy AI in your business misses a broader point.
AI’s ubiquity is inevitable. Sooner than you might think, asking someone if they use AI will be akin to asking if they use email; answers will only vary in the particulars.
The more interesting question will quickly become not if we use AI, but how. More specifically, what skills and values will help our businesses thrive in a world where access to super-intelligent, highly capable AI is table stakes?
As someone who spends a lot of time following the space and working hands-on with the latest technologies, three key areas jump to mind.
Humanism
We operate in a service business, building close relationships with clients in the context of their most personal spaces. In the years ahead, the value of this human connection won’t go down, it will skyrocket.
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In a world where we’re all increasingly interacting with AIs, meaningful personal relationships will take on a new dimension — one that our luxury clientele will readily pay a premium for. Smart companies will leverage this insight to capitalize on the value of building deep, lasting relationships with their customers.
Humanism in business will play an equally critical role when it comes to our teams. Every company will face difficult decisions about how to balance the ethics of “human-first” thinking with the growing competitive pressure to drive efficiency using AI. Striking the right balance will be critical, and outsized results will accrue to the businesses that get this right.
Curiosity
Large Language Models (LLMs) enable savvy users to arrive at business insights with a speed and precision that would have been impossible to fathom only a few short years ago. And in a world where answers are easy to come by, the value accrues to those who ask the right questions.
The most effective business leaders will capitalize on this fact, expanding their focus from solving existing problems to include finding better problems to solve in the first place. Cultures that emphasize open-mindedness, experimentation, and learning will be uniquely positioned to reap the benefits of this coming technological wave, creating virtuous innovation cycles and allowing them to outpace their competition.
Discernment
AI tools can generate an incredible volume of “outputs” with breakneck speed — marketing content, operational reports, system designs, proposals, customer communications, financial projections, meeting summaries, and so on. This abundance will put a premium on the value of judgment and taste.
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Knowing which outputs to trust, which ones to adapt, and which ones to discard will become an increasingly important skill. Take basic quality control, for example. For all their prowess, LLMs occasionally “hallucinate.” Using a plausible-sounding but factually incorrect piece of information generated by an LLM in the wrong context — a large system proposal, for example — could cost you thousands of dollars or, worse, your reputation.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Businesses will have to navigate a myriad of other decisions that will require thorough analysis and weighing of tradeoffs. How do we deploy AI ethically? How do we communicate about our use of AI with customers? How do we maintain our brand identity while still benefiting from the power of AI? These are all difficult judgment calls that owners of businesses everywhere will be faced with in the years ahead. The answers could mean the difference between a thriving business and one that barely stays afloat.
The Path Forward
As AI becomes as ubiquitous as internet connectivity and mobile devices, a new set of skills will emerge as key differentiators in business. It’s important to start thinking now about how you will stand out as these increasingly powerful tools saturate our market. Placing a premium on values like real human connection, deep curiosity, and critical judgment will provide you with an edge in this post-AI world.
