Part 1: How I use AI day-to-day as the CEO of an AI startup (and you can, too)

DROdio -

This is the first of a multi-part post about using AI as an executive knowledge worker and covers determining how "AI Curious" you are.

As the CEO of Storytell.ai, an enterprise collaborative intelligence platform, I'm always leaning into ways I can personally be using AI as much as possible day-to-day, and I often get questions from other executives about my AI habits – and what they should be doing as well. I often hear things like this from executives:

"I made a commitment to myself that in 2024 I would learn to apply AI to my role." - General Manager, public technology company

I'm writing this post to share what I'm doing and to help you make a plan that fits your goals as well.

Is AI going to take my job?

Let's get this out of the way upfront: Just like the printing press absolutely took away the jobs of the monks that were manually scribing books while simultaneously ushering in a fundamental step-change for humanity that ultimately resulted in an expansion of the entire global economy, AI will change how work gets done and that impact will be felt by some as jobs going away, and by others as entirely new types of opportunity being created.

My recommendation: Don't think about it as AI coming for your job. Think about it as someone using AI coming for your job and ensure that person is you. Here's a great exchange with Jensen Huang around AI safety, humans in the loop, and how AI might take or create jobs on a net basis:

"It is more likely that AI is going to create more jobs in the near term... the reason for that is: The first thing that happens with productivity is prosperity. And prosperity– when companies get more successful – they hire more people because they want to expand into more areas.
And so the question is: If you think about a company and say, "OK, if we improve the productivity, they need fewer people." ... Well, that's because the company has no more ideas. But that's not true for most companies. If you become more productive and the company becomes more profitable, usually they hire more people to expand into new areas.
As long as we believe that there are more areas to expand into – that there are more ideas in drug discovery, more ideas in transportation, more ideas in retail, more ideas in entertainment, more ideas in technology... so long as we believe that there are more ideas, the prosperity of the industry, which comes from improved productivity, results in hiring more people, and more ideas.
Go back in history: We can fairly say that today's industry is larger than the world's industries 1,000 years ago. And the reason for that is because obviously, humans have a lot of ideas, and I think that there's plenty of ideas yet for prosperity and plenty of ideas that can be begat from productivity improvements that my sense is that [AI] is likely to generate jobs.
Obviously, net generation of jobs doesn't guarantee that any one human doesn't get fired... it's more likely that someone will lose a job to some other human that uses an AI... so I think the first thing that everyone should do is learn to use AI so they can augment their own productivity, and every company should augment their productivity to be more productive so they can have more prosperity and hire more people."

If you're convinced, as I am, that applying AI to knowledge work is a critical skillset to be an effective executive moving forward, here's my guide about how to build your own personal AI roadmap:

How AI-curious are you willing to be?

This answer is easy for me – very curious, partly because it's my job, but mostly because I'm very passionate about building a company that can "Make Life Meaningful by Making Work Meaningful" for the 1 billion knowledge workers in the world.

Here's what being AI-curious means to me – where do you fall on this spectrum?

An AI-curious executive is someone who is leaning into applying AI in their role personally and is likely looking for ways to improve the effectiveness and job satisfaction of their team, department or company. You are AI-curious if:

  • You are willing to invest the time to gain a deeper-than-surface-level understanding of the AI landscape, technologies, trends and opportunities. This can be as little as 10 minutes per day – or you can go as deep down the rabbit hole as you'd like.
My recommendation for AI-curious executives is to dedicate one hour per day to consume a mix of written and audio content. I've got a number of recommendations below, which I've chunked into "start here" to "go deep."
  • You are willing to change your habits to try new ways of working. This one sounds easy but is hard. You won't learn to apply AI if you don't experiment, and it can be challenging to justify the time to improve on something that's not broken. Doing things the way you've always done them is a recipe for getting left behind.
My recommendation for AI-curious executives is to use AI to get at least one thing done every day – even if the experience doesn't save you time.
  • You are willing to lower your work quality output in the near-term so you can then raise it as you learn what does and doesn't work. This one is especially important because of how quickly AI is moving. As an example: When ChatGPT first came out, University professors judged whether students were using AI to complete assignments based on how poorly they were written. That was with OpenAI's GPT 3.5 large language model (LLM). Now, with Anthropic's Claude 3.0 Opus, the leading model on the market, I've started hearing about professors that are looking for papers that are too well written – at levels above what students can typically produce – a complete flip in just one year. If you try using AI to get work done and then abandon the effort because the output doesn't meet your standards, you won't be able to participate in the learning-loop that will get you to 10x better results.
My recommendation for AI-curious executives is to treat your AI usage as "first pancake" experiments (as my co-founder Erika describes it). We all know what it's like to make that first test pancake that you use to tweak the ones you make afterwards. One way you can do this is to clearly label your work as AI-assisted and have colleagues give you feedback – for example, if you produce a weekly status report, label it with: I used AI to help generate this week's report. I've put the AI-powered results below my typical results in each section, and I'd love to know how they compare to you.

If you're ready to commit to being an AI-curious executive, read on: Let's start learning about the AI landscape:

The AI Landscape: My go-to learning sources

The AI/ML landscape is moving so fast that it's impossible to keep up – so don't stress about trying to. Just dip your toe into things without feeling like you need to stay on top of it all, and lean into the trends that give you the most energy. Here are some of my favorite resources:

Podcasts:

I typically prefer to learn via podcasts because I can listen on-the-go, and I've trained myself to comfortably consume content at 3.46x (this isn't hard, it just takes practice and intention. I recommend subscribing to the podcasts below.

Podcast listening Pro tips: Download the Overcast.fm podcast app and choose "smart speed," which automatically shortens silences. Bump the player speed up by 0.1x until you notice it. Stay at that new speed until it's comfortable. Then rinse and repeat. You can probably bump to 1.2x off the bat before you even notice – you're already consuming content 20% faster.) Also: Set your "skip forward" setting to 60 seconds, and "skip back" to 15 seconds – this makes it easy to skip commercials in 1 minute chunks, and then skip back a bit if you go too far.

Here's a screenshot of the settings described above.

If you want to understand the people & companies active in AI:

If you want to hear well-formed opinions & counter-opinions about AI:

  • Making Sense: Sam Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Try episodes like:
  • Ezra Klein: Ezra writes for the NYTimes opinion section about topics beyond AI, but has some great guests on with great recommendations around AI, like:
    • How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?: Ezra writes: "I can’t for the life of me figure out how to use it in my own day-to-day job. So I wanted to understand what I’m missing and get some tips for how I could incorporate A.I. better into my life right now. And Ethan Mollick is the perfect guide: He’s a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who’s spent countless hours experimenting with different chatbots, noting his insights in his newsletter One Useful Thing and in a new book, “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With A.I.” 
    • Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It?: Ezra writes: "My guest today, Nilay Patel... believes that A.I. content will break the internet as we know it."

Written resources:

I subscribe to a number of written resources about AI, and I post on my Twitter account using #AItrends when I see interesting posts – here's a search result you can bookmark.

Business & Trend Focused:

More technical:

Most Technical:

Hopefully this is a good starting point for you as an AI-curious executive. I'd also love to know what resources you consume as well –

I'll post Part 2 next with specifics about how I use AI in my day-to-day job as CEO – subscribe to receive the update!