Two weeks ago, I was sitting with my daughter, helping her study for a test on linear equations. She’s in 8th grade, and we’re already getting to the point where my recollection of some of the math she’s studying is rusty. Soon she’ll be in high school and I’ll be of no use at all.
She had a set of problems that stumped both of us, and I told her to use ChatGPT to get an explanation for how to solve them so she could learn and practice the approach before school the next day. She told me she didn’t want to, that she didn’t like using AI, and that she’d just ask her teacher in office hours the next day.
While I have sympathy for her reaction, and a preference for her always talking to her teacher when she wants to go deeper, her approach isn’t going to work. The power and leverage created by AI tools is too much to pass on.
Just last month, a member of our 60 Decibels team created a working prototype to replace a piece of software that we’re paying tens of thousands of dollars for. The prototype took 15 minutes — 15 minutes! — to develop on v0.dev, and we expect it to replace the expensive, paid software we’re using sometime this month.
There’s a reason the Shopify CEO’s leaked memo — in which Step 1 reads “Hire an AI before you hire a human” — went viral. If we’re not retooling how we are running our organizations, we are already falling behind. Whereas if we’re diving in, we have the opportunity for unparalleled leverage.
Our job, then, is to keep on talking to the human—in my daughter’s case, her math teacher. But we need to go into that meeting having practiced and learned and honed our skill with the free tutor who now lives in each of our browsers. We need to take every repetitive task, every task that can be easily described, every part of the work that’s not uniquely leveraging our specific skills, relationships and insights, and find a way to have an AI tool improve or take over that part of the work.
