Photo by Rob Pinney
As a father of three, I’ve spent quite a bit of time checking around rooms for monsters. During daylight hours, my kids are inquisitive and confident. But at night, after their teeth are brushed and it’s time to turn out the lights for sleep, a new fear takes over. Once-familiar chairs transform into hunched ghouls. Creatures lurk under beds. Closets become perfect hiding spots for boogeymen, just waiting to make their move.
I get it. The dark is scary. Once we get older, most of us manage to fall asleep without a night light, but the essence of those childhood fears follows us throughout our lives: That is, the fear of the unknown.
AI is presenting an entirely new frontier, changing the way we live and work on a level not seen since the birth of the internet. For many people, this big unknown is scary. They like the way they do things now—why learn something new? Plus, there’s so much information about AI, it can be hard to figure out where to start. Better to just ignore it and hope it goes away—the adult equivalent of sticking your head under the covers. Right?
The problem with that logic is that unlike the monster in the closet, AI won’t just vanish overnight. You have to learn to accept it, and better still, befriend it.
Taking the plunge into using AI in your business can be daunting—or even downright frightening. Here’s how to get started.
Clarify Your Priorities
I have a morning routine that I stick to: After I hit the gym and take a shower, I like to sit, uninterrupted, with my coffee and plot out my priorities for the day. This helps give me a sense of what I want to dedicate my time to, and what I don’t—the latter category are the tasks I try to automate.
If you don’t have a routine like this in place, don’t panic. I recommend conducting what I call a “busywork audit,” where you strategically assess how much time you’re spending on non-priority tasks. Over the course of a regular workweek, note how much time you allocate to certain things—you can do this manually in a spreadsheet by noting your start and stop times, or using a tool like Toggl. Once you’ve spent a week taking inventory, take a step back and look at the results. What proportion of your day are you spending on work that’s meaningful to you, and how much time are you wasting on repetitive, manual tasks? You might be surprised by the data staring back at you.
Knowing that AI can help cut down on some of those mundane, time-sucking tasks, you might be less inclined to fear it. You might even…start to embrace it. Spending too much time on email? Ask your large language model (LLM) of choice to write a draft for you. Meetings cutting into your deep work time? Record them in Otter.ai and scan through the transcript when it’s convenient for you. Or maybe you’ve got a project that’s tedious, but you figure there’s no way AI can do it for you. In that case, read on.
Do Some Research
We don’t know what we don’t know. That is, at least, until we do some research. Everyone has different needs and uses for AI, but it might not be immediately apparent how it can best work for you. According to an analysis from Harvard Business Review, most business functions and more than 40% of all work activity can be augmented, automated, or reinvented entirely with gen AI.
One of my favorite ways to discover new automation opportunities is G2, a peer-to-peer review site that lets you compare software and see what other people are saying. Let’s say I want to compare AI tools that analyze large sets of data—at the recommendation of ChatGPT, I searched G2 for a tool called H20.ai. In addition to reviews and discussions of H20 itself, G2 also recommends several alternatives, with their own corresponding reviews and discussions available at a glance.
The capabilities of AI are still in their infancy, and new tools are being released every day. By spending a few hours each week researching the latest developments and testing them out, you can ensure you’re staying on top of the trends and building out your system in the most effective way possible.
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Refine
It’s important to remember that AI can actually be trained to do the jobs you want it to do. At my company, Jotform, we’ve struggled with fraudsters using our forms for scams. For a long time, we had to catch them manually, but we’ve since started teaching AI to do it for us. Scammers are constantly finding new ways to wreak havoc, but the good news is that each of these phishing innovations is also an AI training opportunity—as a result, our automated defenses are getting stronger every day.
You don’t need a coding background to train gen AI to work for you. Start practicing by entering different prompts into ChatGPT. It probably won’t give you exactly what you want the first time around, and that’s okay. Give it as much context as possible, and be sure to include any vital information. If you want to get truly meta, ask it to give you examples of what a good prompt looks like. Unlike a human, AI doesn’t get exasperated, so tweak your prompt as much as you want. Its knowledge will build on itself, and before long, you’ll find that it performs the tasks you want it to.
Facing the unknown can be daunting. But just like checking the closet for monsters, getting to know AI and its capabilities is the only way to overcome the fear. Start small, stay curious, and keep refining your approach. Eventually, AI will no longer be something to fear—it’ll be a tool you can’t imagine living without.