How AI strengthens employees

Over the weekend I spoke with two founders, two entrepreneurs. I noticed an interesting tendency. Entrepreneurs are falling far behind in understanding the progress, what AI can do today. And as a consequence, they either do not see some really great application in their own case, or see some simple application, while they find it hard to believe in the really advanced things.

This brought me to a few thoughts. Few people really understand the full capabilities of AI, apart from those who work in laboratories, or people like me, who spend all day with AI and integrate it everywhere they can.

One of the strongest points I would like to get across is something I see both in my own work and in other companies we follow. AI can really strengthen your employees a great deal. You can give them something like a performance-enhancing substance that has no consequences for their health and gives them a competitive advantage over other companies, other competitors.

There are two very strong applications of AI today.

The first is shared context and shared memory. Look, if you have been using the paid version of ChatGPT for a long time, it has a very large amount of memory about you: your preferences, requests, circumstances, family, tastes and so on.

One of the strongest things today is the same thing, only about a company, where AI collects information from a company, a group of people, rather than one person, like a collective mind and collective memory. At any moment you can understand what happened yesterday, the day before, a month ago to a particular person in a particular situation, and quickly make sense of it all. This is a very powerful function, and it is exactly what we are working on.

The second powerful function is collecting information from a large number of sources and, very importantly, from a large number of people's heads, so that no important thought is lost.

Imagine a company with 100 people. How long would it take to talk to everyone, find everything out, remember it and take notes? Previously, this kind of work could have taken a whole research team, together with the business owner, a month. Today, if you want to, you can do it in one day.

You can do the same with your customers. You can find out at once what your customers think about a particular feature, a particular service, and hear them. And you do not need a large team for this.

And as a consequence of all this, look at what happens. Your employees get better communication, faster communication, excellent work with context and memory across all areas, meaning they have the highest-quality, up-to-date information in all the important areas.

And in this way your employee gets more solutions, more positive responses, more results. This lights them up as a person, as an employee, as a professional, and they want to do more.

Any kind of dopamine works in exactly the same way. When you get a better, higher-quality response to what you are doing, you want to do more of it.

There is what is called the triangle of successful work. Imagine three points, moving clockwise from one to the next. What do you need for everything at work to go well?

The first condition: work should give you pleasure. Then we move to the next point: work should help you develop. And to the next: work should produce a concrete result. Then it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

If you integrate AI in the areas I have just described, your employee will spend less time doing work they find unpleasant and give more attention to subtle interpersonal communication, to complicated points of connection.

They will develop through this work. Instead of pressing buttons, they will use their intelligence and abilities more. This will help them develop. After this shift, their own work in the company will begin to give them more pleasure, because they will see horizons of opportunities to grow.

And third, this will show up in faster deals, faster feedback, higher-quality work, and the ability to take on more.

This is exactly why good people benefit even more from this integration. And you need to take very good care of them, because good people, good employees, are the most valuable thing right now.