Episode Details

Back to Episodes
AI is making Knowledge Work cheaper & easier— some will benefit huge

AI is making Knowledge Work cheaper & easier— some will benefit huge

Published 1 year, 3 months ago
Description

There’s little debate that AI will change the world. What we’re not so sure about is if AI’s expected disruptions to how we work will be outweighed by the benefits of accessing a super-intelligence.

David Boyle thinks of LLMs as an electric bicycle for the mind, one that enables us to go farther than we ever imagined with much less effort. His opinion comes from being one of the first market researchers to experiment with LLMs and subsequently turn his learnings into the PROMPT series of books to help marketers, startups, researchers, musicians, and other creatives benefit from the emerging technology. He’s an audience research expert who has informed global strategies for many of the world’s biggest brands.

In this episode we explore why David Boyle believes that AI can make strategy & research work faster, cheaper, AND better.

Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple

The conversation explains why any product manager, researcher, strategist, or creative should leverage AI. The greatest advantages are speed and quantity because GenAI overcomes research’s most time-intensive tasks: codifying and thematic analysis of large data sets.

David admits that one of the biggest challenges is that AI are often confidently wrong and that experts must verify the results.

This episode raises important questions:

* If AI will make all tasks faster, what changes should we expect to our way of working? Consider how the internet is homogenizing the way we live globally.

* If a human expert must verify results, how can we trust the results of AI tasks as soon as the velocity scales past the number of humans in-the-loop?

* If executives are excited by AI reducing the cost of research, what will stop them from preferring synthetic or non-human verified data once the cost nears zero?

Recommended articles

The Future of Design: How AI Is Shifting Designers from Makers to Curators by Andy Budd

“AI is transforming design, shifting designers from hands-on creators to curators focused on strategy” is the most common prediction about where design is headed. The author believes the design roles will evolve to where and how they can best deliver value and it will likely be in enhancing the quality of work delivered by AI. As optimistic as it sounds —hey everyone wants to be more strategic, yay!— the truth is that in this future scenario, the concept of being a design completely changes with most being dedicated to managing AI tasks and the best assigned to bespoke design tasks that must be perfect.

The End of Programming as We Know It by Tim O’reilly

Makes a case that each fear cycle about software developers getting replaced actually led to an evolution of the craft. He admits that “Eventually much of what programmers do today may be as obsolete” but that it will be more akin to how the old skill of debugging was replaced with roles tackling more complex tasks. As knowledge workers we have to be concerned because our work can’t be quantified and automated in the same way as the production-line model of development.

Listen Now