A new blog is released 🎉

💡 I've been sharing my thoughts on how innovative tech such as AI and VR are revolutionizing areas like leadership and project management and helping us boost productivity.

I feel it’s difficult to navigate my posts as the content is growing.

🔍 To provide a more searchable experience, I've decided to collect these scattered posts into an organized collection.

Thinkers Torch is my new blog, serving the aforementioned purpose 🚀

This is where all my thoughts on these subjects will be stored and categorized for easy navigation 📚🗂️

Everything will still be published on LinkedIn 😅

I hope the blog will be a helpful resource for you.

If there are specific topics you'd like me to cover, or if you have any suggestions or inquiries, please feel free to connect with me.

Eye opener from Yuval Harari!

 🎙️ Lex Friedman, one of my absolute favorite podcast hosts, has recently interviewed the historian Yuval Harari (author of books like Sapiens and Homo Deus). A thought provoking interview - give it a listen!

At the end of the interview, Lex asks Yuval for advice to young people how to have a successful career.

🎯 The answer is profound and applies to companies as well as individuals…

(For a full quote answer please listen to the podcast)

Yuval:

It’s the first time in history nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 10 years. … Throughout history, it was never possible to predict the future. But the basic structures of life will not change. Most people will still be peasants. Armies would fight on horseback with swords and bows and arrows and things like that. So you could learn a lot from the wisdom of your elders. They’ve been there before and they knew what kind of basic skills you need to learn.

Now we have no idea how the job market would look like in 10 years. We have no idea what skills will still be needed.

So the most important skill is the skill to keep learning and keep changing throughout our lives, which is very, very difficult. To keep reinventing ourselves.

Traditionally, people thought about education like building a stone house with very deep foundations. Now it’s more like setting up a tent that you can fold and move to the next place very, very quickly.

…

🤔 How do you feel about reinventing yourself? What about your company? Do you focus on stability or agility?

#390 – Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies | Lex Fridman Podcast

Hey Enterprise, you can start using AI now!

During the spring we read about companies such as Apple, Samsung, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs etc., banning the use of large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) due to concerns regarding data privacy, quality, and ethics. These concerns involve potential exposure of confidential information, generation of inaccurate outputs, and violation intellectual property rights.

This might apply for you as well…

There is good news, Microsoft just introduced Bing Chat Enterprise which gives you access to GPT-4 directly in your browser. It addresses some of the mentioned blockers:

🔒 Strict data protection, ensuring your business data stays within your organization.

🚫 Microsoft does not have access to view or use your chat data. Your information remains strictly yours and is not used for AI model training.

Since Microsoft is backing these statements with its reputation, it should really be safe to start picking the AI fruits.

Are you already using ChatGPT in your business? What are the greatest benefits? If not, will you start now when the Enterprise option is available?

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/07/18/furthering-our-ai-ambitions-announcing-bing-chat-enterprise-and-microsoft-365-copilot-pricing/

OpenAI Code Interpreter for Us Non-Coders 😀

🧩 Another Piece of the Future-of-Work Puzzle is served.

OpenAI Code Interpreter from a non-coder perspective

As shown in numerous examples, we are shifting our interactions with computers from us doing the dirty work to having the computer doing it for us.

One simple example for the new paradigm of work - say that you want to switch to dark mode on your Windows computer, the instructions are:

1️⃣ Select Start > Settings

2️⃣ Select Personalization > Colors.

3️⃣ Under Choose your color, select Custom.

4️⃣ Under Choose your default Windows mode, select Dark.

You kindly follow the instructions and get it done 😅

With AI integrated into Windows, you simply type “turn on dark mode”, the AI will understand what you mean and execute the steps for you. You say, it does.

This way of interacting with our tech will be extrapolated to all areas.

OpenAI Code Interpreter is enabling this way of working, you tell it what to do and it does it. “Does it” might include writing and executing some code. As a user you don’t need to understand what is going on under the hood. However, ChatGPT kindly informs what it is doing as an attempt to create transparency and trust(?)

Code Interpreter can do a lot, let’s scratch the surface with a few examples.

📊 Say that you are a project manager and have an Excel file with your budget and actuals. At the end of the month, you get another excel file with costs. Now you can simply upload both files to ChatGPT and ask it to update the budget file, it kindly deducts the costs from the right posts. You say, it does.

As a second step, you could ask it to write a monthly status update report based on the new budget file and recent sprint log using a pre-defined reporting format. You say, it does.

📊 Another example, you can tell it to

📌 write a project time plan,

📌 break it down into sprints and

📌 suggest tasks for the first sprint per role. It can even help you with estimating time, no it will not be perfect - but from what I've seen in projects, we (humans) are quite bad at estimating times as well 😉

With Code Interpreter you now have the capability of creating your charts, analyze data and manipulate files.

📝 Polishing this a few steps more, it can take care of much you the post meeting work, such as updating task lists and drafting e-mails.

Gartner estimated that 80% of today´s (2019) project management tasks will be eliminated by 2030. 8 months after the release of ChatGPT this seems highly likely, or will we even get there faster?

💭 What parts of that work can an AI assistant help you with? Have you tried it?

🚀 In the very near future, we will hand over much of the doing to our AI-assistants, there is no doubt about it. Even if the AI development stopped today, it will be the case.

🔑 How do you prepare for this shift? Education? Strategic planning? Playing with the tech in small projects? What do you need to get started?

AI: The Game Changer We Can't Ignore

I recently listened to podcast from Microsoft Worklab, with Ethan Mollick, a professor at The Wharton School who's is known for e.g. integrating AI into his curriculum since early 2023 and for his Substack "One Useful Thing" where he translate academic research into useful business insights.

A few key ideas that stood out:
1️⃣ AI is Transformative and Here to Stay: AI isn't just another tech trend. It's a general-purpose technology impacting every aspect of our lives, even if all AI development stopped today.
2️⃣ Working with AI: Imagine AI as a collaborator not as a google search box. It’s an entity that can help you refine drafts, suggest improvements, or lend a more formal tone to your language. The biggest AI use cases could well be in writing documents and conducting research, promising significant productivity gains. What does it mean for you and your organisation?
3️⃣ A Task-level Revolution: AI will not replace jobs - but tasks. Jobs are bundles of tasks, and AI is perfectly suited to take over some of these tasks. The shift isn't necessarily at the job level; it's more about changing how we handle tasks.
4️⃣ Work will change: Large corporations with lots of layers of middle management are built on the technologies and capabilities we have today. That will change since we have different capabilities now. Are you still going to do sprints as the way of organizing work? When AI can structure your work. We have to change how we work, which will be huge.

🚀 And a few ways to get the ball rolling!

1️⃣ Start Small and Encourage Experimentation: Begin with integrating AI into manageable tasks. This could be as simple as automating email responses or scheduling meetings. It's crucial to foster an environment that encourages experimentation with AI.
2️⃣ Time and Training: Understanding and effectively using AI requires time and training. A rough estimate is around 10 hours of hands-on experience before gaining real value from AI.
3️⃣ Inclusivity in Adoption: As we integrate AI into our organizations, it's crucial to ensure that adoption is inclusive and beneficial for all employees. This might mean providing additional support for those less tech-savvy or ensuring that AI tools are accessible to all.

💚 AI's future in our workplaces isn't just about the technology; it's about people, processes, and potential. What are your thoughts on this? and how do you plan to integrate AI into your workflow? I'd love to hear from you.

🥳 A final challange
Mollick suggests an interesting idea: motivate your most creative people to use AI for a week and reward the best automation idea. This challenge could inspire new ways to leverage AI within your organization. Do you think that would make sense in your organisation?