AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443)

Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443)

December 12, 2024

MidJourney generated image of robot and woman interacting to illustrate that AI is not the future, you are.

I’m having a ton of conversations lately about how AI will affect the future of work and employment. Many of these conversations start off with questions like “What will AI do to my job?” And, of course, “What happens to my job in the future?”

AI is a big deal. No two ways about it. But, here’s the thing: AI is not the future. You are.

You have control of what your future looks like. Sure, AI could affect pieces of your life. It already does. But you have lots of say in terms of what your life looks like overall.

How will that work? How can you ensure that AI plays the right role in your life? And how do you make sure that your job — and more importantly, your life — reflects the future you’re looking for? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) — Headlines and Show Notes
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You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 27m 01s

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Transcript: AI Is Not the Future. You Are

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud. Your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 443 of The Big Show and thank you so much for listening today. I am so thrilled you’re here and I think we’ve got a really cool show for you today.

This one’s going to be a little bit weirder than normal, because I’m kind of in a philosophical mood. I’ve got a bunch of stuff on my mind that, you know, is a little outside of what I normally talk about on the show.

I’ve been having just a ton of conversations lately with people about their careers, and the effects of artificial intelligence on their personal development, and where things might be going on a personal level for them, and for me, and probably for you. And so I thought it was okay to talk about this.

You know, part of my Rutgers Business School Exec Ed classes focus on AI in marketing and AI in customer service, which is partly what led to this, and I’ve been having a bunch of different mentoring and reverse mentoring conversations that have really brought this to the fore. And I thought it made sense to start with a few baseline predictions for where artificial intelligence will be in the next year, as relates to you, as relates to your job, as relates to your career.

And I want to be really clear. These are assumptions. They are, I think, solid assumptions. I think they’re well grounded assumptions. But I’m not a hundred percent confident on any of these. I’m like sixty to seventy percent confident, some a little more than others.

But you know, there’s obviously room for things to move here if, if we see AI models continuing to plateau, I will be more confident that these will hold true. If somebody comes out with a big breakthrough that we’re not expecting, you know, GPT 5 or something like that, then maybe I, these get a little more uncertain. But nonetheless, it seems obvious at this point that AI probably isn’t going to take your job.

There are, of course, exceptions to this, but if you were listening to this show, if you’re a marketing professional, if you’re a content creator, if you’re somebody who focuses on, you know, connecting with customers using digital tools, here’s what you’ll Your job isn’t going away in the next year.

No two ways about it. The current generation of tools simply exhibit too many hallucinations and too many inherent biases to completely replace most of the knowledge work that I run into regularly. Sure, obviously, lots of folks are already outsourcing a wide array of tasks within jobs. And some leaders are starting to ask, okay, can we use these tools to outsource specific jobs?

That is absolutely happening. But most of the marketing and sales and business development roles that are common among the show’s listeners are supported by AI, they’re augmented by AI, and they probably will be for a while. They’re not outright going to be replaced by artificial intelligence. Sure, that could change.

I also suspect we’re going to have some reasonable amount of heads up if that starts to happen. I’m paying some attention to various financial analyses that suggest we can do more with less and, you know, handle losses by attrition. But the likelihood that your job’s going to go away is pretty slim.

I’ve been doing this kind of work for quite a while and that approach of how do we do more with less and how do we, you know, deal with loss by attrition, you know, we shrink by attrition, let people Migrate themselves out over time. That’s not even remotely new. Folks have been doing that for a long, long time.

I don’t see why this time around is any different.

We will absolutely see more artificial intelligence in people’s lives. Almost certainly baked into existing tools more so than through the exact acquisition of lots of new tools. You’re undoubtedly seeing that right now. I mean, when’s the last time you had a conversation with a vendor of anything where they didn’t bring up AI at some point in the discussion, right?

I mean, that’s just the way it works right now.

Another thing that I think you can easily expect is we’re undoubtedly going to see some AI backlash in the next 9 to 12 to 18 months. I’m already seeing this. I don’t think this is much of a prediction. This is happening now. I’m not predicting the future. I’m, you know, I’m broadcasting the present. CEOs and CFOs have been signing off on a huge number of pilot programs, a huge number of tests. And they’re starting to demonstrate impatience for results. The joke I keep hearing from senior executives right now is, “I’ve got more pilots than Delta. I want outcomes.” That’s just the reality of the world we live in.

And, you know, obviously there’s a macro economy that we’ve got to think about. There’s if you live in the United States, there’s going to be a change in presidential administrations. Who all knows what happens there? I mean, that will certainly swing this in one direction or the other. On that one, I’m not going to make any huge predictions because it’s tough to tell. But the backlash is definitely coming. People want to see more results, and we should expect them to be asking for more results. very much.

But here’s the thing I know about the future and here’s where I’m going to take a hard left turn in this discussion. Because it’s not about artificial intelligence.

When you think about your career and you think about where you want to be, AI is not the future. You are. You get to decide if you’ll use these tools and how you’ll use these tools. You get to decide what you want your work to look like And you get to decide what you want your life to look like. You get to decide how to make that happen.

I know that might sound crazy, but it’s true. You can do something today that has nothing to do with AI. Or you could do something that absolutely leans into AI, if it really matters to you, if you really find that interesting and valuable. You get to decide.

So I would suggest, ignore the predictions. There’s a, there’s a quote that I love that says, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Which, okay, obnoxious, arrogant, but true. You get to decide.

The question I’d ask you, the question I ask folks when I’ve been having these conversations is, what do you want? What are your goals? What matters to you? Where do you want to be five years down the road, and ten years down the road, and fifteen years down the road? And I don’t mean in exactly what job or exactly what your work day will look like, because that’s too hard to tell when we get down the road. But what excites you? What gets you out of bed in the morning and makes you say this is some place I want to spend my time.

It doesn’t just have to be about work, by the way. This is true for life generally. This could be about relationships. It could be about health and fitness. It could be about money. It could be about personal growth. It could be about your community. What are the kinds of things that you want to do that interest you?

What are the kinds of things that make you happy, your life worth living for you, make you feel valuable?

You may be familiar that there’s this Japanese concept called ikigai, which refers to your sense of purpose, what’s your reason for living. And it’s a really simple concept, right? When you think about it, it’s, it’s the intersection of four things.

It’s what do you love? What are you good at? What is the world value? And what will it pay you for? That’s it. How do you find the spot that works for you? Not just today, but longer term, over the course of your life.

There’s lots of ways you can do this. There’s, there’s a great tool, there’s a technique using something called a balance wheel or sometimes a wheel of life. I’ll post a couple of links in the show notes or you can Google at your leisure. To assess where you are on six to ten attributes and see where you’re feeling pretty good about where you are and where you feel like you’re falling short in terms of achieving balance. You basically rate yourself on a scale of, it depends on which one you use, you might do it on a scale of one to five, you might do it on a scale of one to ten.

But as you think of the various things in your life that matter to you, your, your personal life, your personal growth, your. Health, your money, your relationships, your community, and you rank yourself, and you kind of draw this picture of, Oh, do I have a nice circle here? Or do I have, you know, sort of this lumpy, bumpy mass that says, I’m falling short in some areas in my own life.

You then use that to say, cool, this is where I want to set my goals. This is where I want to improve this year and next year and the next. I want to go ahead and move forward and grow and get, you know, a better shaped wheel here. The most successful people I have ever known always have self directed goals in more than one part of your life.

And success isn’t just about goals. A case of financial success or professional success. It means where do you feel like you want to do well? It’s thinking purposefully about what matters to you and then working towards it. What is the future you want? The future can’t just be something that happens to you, it’s something you work towards, it’s something you strive for, it’s something you reach for.

And you don’t want to worry about how you’re going to make that future happen. Believe it or not, that’s, that’s Not the way to do it. It’s easy to find ways to shoot down ideas when you’re thinking about what you’d like it to look like. Don’t do that. Seriously, ignore that. Think about what you want, what really matters to you.

Think big, right? I see people far too often, you know, in mentoring relationships, especially where people talk about their goals in incremental terms, and that’s okay. That’s totally okay, especially if we’re talking about where do we want to be a month from now. But if you’re thinking about your life, if you’re thinking about the next few years, whether it’s a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now, What would it look like if your goals were 200 percent or 300 percent or 1000 percent larger than where you are today?

Think about what your world would look like. Think about how you would live and act in that world. Yes, your goals should be achievable in some reasonable time frame. The fact is though, you’re undoubtedly a thousand percent better today than you were at some earlier point in your life. You’re almost certainly making more money than you did ten years ago, and probably more money than you ever thought you might make ten years ago.

If you think 3 percent raise every year over the last decade, you’re Today, you’ve increased your income more than 34%, right? That’s a pretty big lift. You’ve already achieved that, so why not increase your salary by 34% in five years or three in many cases? I bet you’re making 10 times what you made at some earlier point in your career or in your lifetime.

And that’s just the financial side. I bet you’re 10 times better at something you used to struggle with. I know I am in lots of areas. I’m sure that’s true of you. People grow. We get better at things over time. The best part of thinking like this, by the way, is Is that if you fall short when striving for something ten times bigger or better than what you’ve done in the past, you’re still gonna end up in a much better place than you are today.

Okay, maybe you don’t achieve a thousand percent growth. Cool, you only achieve five hundred percent growth. That’s still pretty great, and that’s still where you wanna be, regardless of what happens in the world around you with artificial intelligence or anything else. I obviously have to acknowledge that it’s not always easy to do this once you’ve set those goals.

That’s okay. You want to have the goals as a guiding light, as a signpost, as something you’re moving towards. And of course, not everyone has the same advantages in life. It’s one of the reasons why I’m always inspired by people who manage to overcome great challenges in their life. I was reading the other day about a woman who I’ve heard about many times over the years, and I find her to be one of the most inspirational figures ever was this woman named Madam C.J. Walker. Madam C.J. Walker was born two days before Christmas in 1867, so 157 years ago. She was a black woman and the first member of her family ever to be born outside of slavery in the United States. Right? So this is somebody who came from some serious challenges compared to many people. Over the course of her life, she developed, marketed, and sold a wide range of cosmetics and hair care products for black women in a very different environment, right? We’re talking about the early 1900s.

And according to Wikipedia, this is a quote, “She is recorded as the first female self made millionaire in America in the Guinness Book of World Records.” The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes her as the first woman self made millionaire in America. That is genuinely remarkable.

What’s more remarkable to me, is that she also built schools and training centers. Again, according to Wikipedia, in addition to training in sales and grooming, Walker showed other black women how to budget, build their own businesses, and encouraged them to be financially independent. Again, that’s remarkable.

She didn’t just build her business. She helped thousands, possibly tens of thousands of other women, build successful businesses and successful lives. She’s an icon. I mean, it’s absolutely remarkable. And she did all of this as the child of formerly enslaved people.

Imagine the world she worked in and lived in, day in and day out. Now imagine all the possibilities that are out there. I am being dead serious. I could not be more serious about this. When I say I’d rather live in a world when I’m competing with artificial intelligence, when I’m competing with a computer, than with the racism and sexism in the world that Madam C.J. Walker had to deal with every day.

I’ve never experienced anything remotely like that. Bring on the robots, man. They do not scare me. And I would say they shouldn’t scare you. Seriously, there are much bigger problems in the world for lots of people, and there have been much bigger problems in the world for lots of people in history than anything we’re dealing with right now. I just don’t see it as a huge issue in terms of how it’s going to affect your day to day. If you think about it from a certain perspective and if you work at it from a certain perspective.

And the last thing that I want to say about this, the last thing that I want to focus on and really remind you is that as the saying goes, It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a long race.

A boss of mine used to say that your professional life roughly lasts for 40 years. From roughly, if you think about it, you start your career more or less when you’re 25, you end your career more or less when you’re 65. So that’s a 40 year period. And you can divide that into four 10 year quarters.

If you’re listening to this show and you’re 30 or younger, you’ve just barely started the first quarter of your working life. You have so much time ahead of you. So no matter where you are at the moment, if it feels like it’s a, you know, Too hard or there’s, you know, too much change going on. You got a long way to go. Just take a breath and keep moving forward. You got a long, long way to go.

If you’re in your 30s, you haven’t yet reached halftime of the game, right? You’ve got, again, a ton of ways to go. If you’re in your mid 40s, you still have another 20 years ahead of you, or roughly double your career to date. Think of everything you’ve done over that 20 year period and what you still can accomplish in the next 20 years.

The best part is you can apply this to adulthood more generally. You don’t have to just think about this from a work perspective. That covers everything from about 15 to maybe 85. You could divide that into, four quarters of 17-and-a-half years a pop. You get my point. The point is you’ve got a lot of time in terms of that. Think of what you can accomplish during those periods. You’ve got a ton of time ahead of you and an immense amount of time to become anything you want to be, whomever you want to be multiple times over.

In fact, don’t let one day, or one year, or one decade define you. Keep moving, keep growing, keep learning. The only direction is forward. The best thing about our lives is that we’re time travelers. We move forward one day at a time, every day. We move forward one year at a time, every year. You can’t go back. You get to go forward.

I turned 56 this week, and I’m about to add “published nonfiction author” to my bio for the first time ever. I also have plans to finish a novel, probably by early 2026, to boot, just because I want to. Because it’s an itch I want to scratch, it’s something I want to do.

Who knows what else I’m going to do in the fourth quarter of my career, and the next 25 to 35 years of my life? I am as excited for this as anything I’ve ever done.

So when I sum all this up, am I worried about AI? Not really. I’m not. I think about it. I recognize that the world will undoubtedly change, and probably dramatically in the next decade, whether AI is the cause or — something else is that we haven’t even seen yet.

I keep learning, and I keep preparing, and I keep planning in case things change quickly. I can’t necessarily predict everything that’s going to happen, but I can make plans to be ready to adapt to things that I haven’t thought about yet. You know, there’s the old quote you’ve probably heard, “Plans are useless. Planning is essential.”

I also keep learning about the people around me and what they need and how I can help them. I use AI as a tool, too, to help me learn and grow, not just about artificial intelligence and the internet and digital, but about a whole host of topics.

You should absolutely read, you should absolutely check out Ethan Mollick’s book, “Co-Intelligence, Living and Working with AI.” In particular, check out Chapter 7, AI as a Tutor, and Chapter 8, AI as a Coach, for more on how you can use AI to learn and grow.

Just remember, though, that there is so much possibility in the world. Connect with customers and with people. And with their humanity, let the machines be the machines, be a good human, learn what people need and how you can help them achieve it, enjoy where you are as best as you can every day.

Life is hard, trouble will find you on its own, you don’t need to go looking for it. Enjoy the moment you’re in as best as you can. Build strong relationships with the people who love you and people you love. Make the best choices you can with the information you have available to yourself. And then the rest will take care of itself, mostly.

As I said at the top, AI isn’t the future. You are. And that’s going to be true as long as you let yourself do it. Personally, I can’t wait to see what you do.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 443.

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Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

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