Hello, good morning. It’s Saturday here in lovely Delaware. The weather’s beautiful.
I wanted to reach out to you all because here and there in the CEC community, I’ve been talking about AI. Some of you know me, some of you don’t. My name is Kay Stoner. I’ve been in the knowledge management information retrieval search space since the late eighties nineties, and I’ve run search programs at places like Fidelity Investments and Dell Technologies.
I’m hearing a lot of talk here and there about AI – just everywhere in the world right now, as well as in the CEC group. I wanted to weigh in and offer another perspective for people, because I’ve been doing this stuff for a while,, now.
They call it AI artificial intelligence, and that’s fine, but a lot of us have been working with this stuff in different ways for a long time. Things like cleaning up data, machine learning, having bodies of knowledge to train information retrieval systems on, structuring the kinds of interactions that people will have, getting them the information they need – all that stuff, all the things that we currently call AI (“Artificial Intelligence”) have been actually going on for quite some time – at least 20+ years for people like me and even longer for other people.
I think part of the problem with AI is that the marketers got hold of it. (And I can say things about marketers because I was in digital marketing for many years, so I’m allowed lol). From what I’ve seen, I think there’s a real issue with AI having been embraced and promoted by the marketers right off the bat.
First off, they want everybody to sign up for their programs to start an AI marketing agency. That makes no sense whatsoever, because if you don’t understand marketing, artificial intelligence isn’t going to do anything for you.
The other thing, too, is that from personal experience and my own personal perspective, from being in high tech and having worked with technology since, oh, 1983… Calling it “artificial intelligence”, the only thing that’s true about it is (and maybe this isn’t even that true), the “artificial” part. It’s not intelligent, people. It’s just not. I don’t know why they keep labeling it this, but it’s a marketing thing.
Fundamentally, AI as we now have it, is pattern matching. It’s basically like Google or other kinds of search on steroids. It’s something that you can have a conversation with. We’ve been moving towards this for quite some time, because back in the day, you couldn’t put a question in. You couldn’t phrase your search query as a question and expect to get anything back. But now that’s normal, and this is what everybody does.
So we’ve been moving towards this point all along, and we’ll continue to move. But calling this whole thing “intelligence”? No, it’s trained on a massive corpus of a whole bunch of information.
And when you prompt it, it just looks at word patterns and says, “Oh, well, you put this pattern into your input box. And so therefore, I’m going to look at my files and see what pattern I should spit back at you. Which is the most acceptable pattern I can use?”
This is what a lot of the AI training is doing. It’s reinforcing what patterns work and what patterns don’t. It’s nothing more than that.
AI does not understand, at least in the current iteration. As far as we know, it doesn’t understand what we’re saying. It doesn’t understand what it’s saying back. It’s just looking for patterns. So to call this “artificial intelligence” is a complete misnomer. It’s misleading, and it also puts the emphasis on the technology.
Can we please not do that as much as we are right now? I have a different perspective, and I’m actually in the process of taking some courses with Vanderbilt, some online courses with Coursera about generative AI – building custom assistants and trustworthy regenerative AI, along with number of other topics.
One thing that Jules White, the instructor, said that is very, very true (and I totally agree, so it must be so LOL), is that AI doesn’t necessarily stand for “artificial intelligence”. It can also stand for “Augmented Intelligence”.
Augmented intelligence helps your intelligence. When we say Augmented Intelligence, we’re putting the emphasis on the people. We’re putting the emphasis on what humans can do. We’re talking about augmenting what we have and not saying, “Oh, yeah, well, this is going to come in and replace us all.”
Because it can’t. It just cannot. That’s another discussion for another day. But it’s impossible. It can’t. Ultimately, experts may think it will, but philosophically and theoretically – and also based on logic – it just can’t.
So what can it do for us? If it can’t fulfill that massive promise of AI doing everything for us, what good is it?
Well, it’s good because it helps us be better at what we do.
How, pray tell, does it do that?
It gives us access to more information. Do you have any idea how much research is out there? Oh, my heavens. There’s a lot. Like, if you look at Arxiv and these other research repositories where people are just posting stuff, it’s kind of like open-sourcing the research world. There’s all kinds of information out there, massive amounts of research, and there’s also a lot of content that’s been written and published and discussed over the years that AI can be trained on – and that it has been trained on.
So it gives you access to all of this information, all of these insights, all these perspectives and so forth for you to use. It’s there to augment your understanding. It’s to augment your thought processes, to augment your decision making, and build on what you bring to the table.
It’s not going to do it for you, because you need to understand how to ask it, how to direct it, how to tap into all of it. AI will only do what it’s told to do. At this point, anyway.
You can’t say, you know, AI, build me a car. It has no idea what kind of car. A sedan? I pickup? I hatchback? An EV? A classic car? And then what about all the features and functionality in that car? It can’t read your mind. Well, theoretically, anyway… that’s another discussion for another time. I’ve seen some compelling (and terrifying research ).
But anyway, we’re not going to go dystopian right now. We’re going to be hopeful, and we’re going to look at how this can help us, because it really, really can.
What would it mean, if you were stuck in a situation with a client? You were just stuck… but you had an impartial, objective portal to all the things that have been said and discussed and revealed and researched in the world, pertaining to this situation that you’re in?
What if you had a really, really tricky client and you weren’t making any progress whatsoever and you couldn’t figure it out? What if you had access to an impartial, confidential source that you could vent to, and that could read your sentiment and then say, “Oh, well, based on this, this is what other people have found helpful.”
How would it be to have access to that? Because you do.
In a way, AI is just search on steroids. It’s search taken to the next level, and it gives us access to the information that we need and the information we didn’t even realize we needed.
It helps our thought process, it helps our understanding. It rounds out our offerings – what we offer to ourselves and what we offer to other people.
So, as coaches, I really, really strongly advise you and encourage you to look into AI as Augmented Intelligence. Not Artificial intelligence, because that’s ridiculous.
What could Augmented Intelligence do for you? Having a different perspective, having access to all the things. And not just the things in your own world and your own language… A lot of research out there and a lot of writings have been translated.
You could have access to the finest French thinkers, the finest Vietnamese thinkers, the finest… Malawian thinkers who have their brains in really interesting places, working with really interesting perspectives. (Granted, translation is never going to be 100%. I also used to work in the localization space, and it’s never going to be 100%, but it, you know, close enough… It’s something.)
AI just builds out what you can consider. It enlarges the sphere of your processing. It gives you more data points.
AI is particularly useful at that nexus where there’s a whole bunch of information out there, and there’s a whole bunch of information that’s needed. But we do not have a bridge between people and the machines.
We have kind of a NASA problem right now. Back in the day, when NASA was first collecting all the data, they they were collecting so much from space, they couldn’t parse it. They didn’t know what to do with it, so they put it in storage and they couldn’t access it. They didn’t even know what they had.
We’re a similar situation now. Fortunately, we now have a way to bridge that gap. We have a way to access that, and that is through Augmented Intelligence, or AI.
So if you’ve been skeptical and reluctant to embrace AI in your coaching practice, I hope you’re going to reconsider your position on AI. I hope you come to understand the possibilities for it, and also understand that you are the one who’s directing it.
You need to be specific about what you ask for. You need to be clear on what exactly you want to get back from it, what you’re putting into it, and what you want to get back, because it will often give you exactly what you ask for. If you don’t ask well… you’re not going to get very good stuff.
Garbage in, garbage out. Not that what you’re putting in is garbage, but you know what I mean.
So anyway, those are my thoughts and hope you will consider if you’ve been thinking, “No thanks, AI is going to try to take my job, but AI can never replace me!”
No, it can’t replace you, but it can augment you, and it can make you a better coach. It can even make you a better person.
It’s amazing.
Reach out to me anytime if you have questions or if you’d like to discuss further.