The New AI Manager
AI is great for people who have expertise and know how to ask the right questions
Last night after dinner, Steve and I lingered on the back deck for a while chatting about work and weekend plans. Weekend plans include a local birthday party, The Odyssey, and a visit to my parents. Our work chat was more interesting than the usual gripes about annoying co-workers and new HR rules. We talked about how we’re integrating AI into our jobs.
I set up a new company last spring in a huge rush. I already had customers and instantly needed a website, business cards, social media, logo, invoice system, and a million other basic needs. I documented some of that journey last month, but Steve told me to stop sharing my secrets with my competition.
I used AI a lot in those first few months of business creation, which saved me months of work and money. Need a logo? AI help. Too tired to think up a Facebook description? AI to the rescue. How do I change the name of my business? AI had the answers.
Now that I have the basics set up, I’m using AI to create more than generic logos and SEO-friendly website content. I’m using it to create higher-level systems to make my business run more efficiently.
My job is to provide expert answers to very specific questions for my customers. I can save them years of research by giving them information and helping them make tough decisions. A lot of what I do is locked in my brain, but I can still make the process more efficient.
So, I am streamlining processes behind the most essential tasks that I do as a consultant. I use four different AI systems because they each have their own strengths. One system is best for finding patterns in multiple 40-page reports and extracting key data points. Another system is better at processing words.
One of my four systems did a nice developmental edit on a 50,000-word manuscript, reducing redundancy and pointing out inconsistencies in my references. I poured the words from this much-neglected manuscript into the system, and it created something better. That manuscript still needs a big rewrite — something that AI can’t do — but it cleaned up the repetitions, and it provided ballast to the last few chapters that were sketched out.
I could have hired a professional editor to do a developmental edit on my rough manuscript. It would have cost about $5,000 and taken two months. (AI gave me those numbers.) Instead, I spent $20 for a premium subscription and got a more polished manuscript in 30 seconds. Several of my good friends are in the publishing industry. Should they worry?
If I were a freelance developmental editor, I wouldn’t worry about competition with AI. Instead, I would use those tools to edit more manuscripts faster and increase the volume of customers. Customers will still want someone with expertise to oversee the process and catch errors. A book for a big publisher absolutely needs the human touch.
Also, with continued use of AI, the user creates “agents” who are trained by the human to focus on certain things, produce specific documents, and use specific language and terminology. AI gets better when an expert teaches it how to behave. At Steve’s office, workers are creating AI agents that do certain aspects of their jobs, which frees them up for higher-level work.
At the end of the day, AI needs two things from humans — expertise and direction.
I couldn’t create an AI agent that would enable me to write a real estate contract, for example. I don’t know anything about real estate law, so I wouldn’t know what would need to be in the document. I assume that a contract for a personal home is different from a commercial property, but I have no idea what it should look like. I couldn’t judge whether it was drafted correctly.
To really take advantage of AI, deep knowledge is necessary.
In addition, AI needs a skilled user. You have to know how to talk to a machine and ask the right questions with logic and precision. Do this, but not that. If this happens, then add this. Maybe this will lead to a resurgence in logic and philosophy college education.
Creativity still matters. Too many people are using ChatGPT to make advertising flyers for their small businesses. I did that in April (examples here), but stopped because I can spot a ChatGPT flyer a mile away. My Facebook feed is clogged with them. Gag. I’m now using less well-known systems or making my own flyers on Canva, because I’m so sick of the AI-generated flyers. When I need to make a new logo later this year, I’ll hire a human from Fiverr.
AI did not write this newsletter. I can spot AI-generated words a mile away. I didn’t even ask it to edit for me. I might ask it to write a good title, because I hate doing that. (In the end, AI liked my title better than their ideas.)
AI isn’t going to replace humans. We’re not looking at a Terminator situation. The benefit will be something much more mundane. It’s going to help real estate lawyers write better contracts, help developmental editors do faster edits, and help consultants systematize and scale up their businesses.
People aren't going to acquire deep knowledge if AI is used in the way that its chief boosters promote. You wouldn't know if it had edited your manuscript to your satisfaction if you hadn't edited and written work substantially on your own before. Generative AI is going to kill the developmental loops that most people who've worked with it recognize are essential to using it as a tool. Since it's not essential--you could have done all the work you describe doing yourself or with human help before generative AI existed--this is a pretty strong argument against using generative AI. We could do without it--the constraint on you in this case was that you didn't have the money to pay humans to do that work and you didn't want to take the time it would take for it to get done. That's arguably a problem either with our economy and the way we make funding available to start small businesses or a problem of allocation within your own household, e.g., you aren't seriously invested in the business you are starting. (Which, if so, might turn out to be a much bigger problem for all of us, if we are all of us starting businesses so easily and without initial risk that we swamp the economic niches open for those businesses.)
I don't see anybody promoting substantial AI use who is even slightly addressing the problem of its near-total choking off of the paths that lead people to develop the expertise that is supposedly the core value that we have to offer our workplaces or our clients.
Just a note - I'm sure you've thought this through for yourself but some agents and publishers are requiring human authorship warranties, so if anyone's writing a book and planning to publish it traditionally, it's a good idea to do a check on the market expectations for AI content and use. It may be particularly important to have used premium versions where your text does not go into the training data.