A Computational Companion: Empowering Yourself With AI

It’s almost 2024. Artificial Intelligence is officially everywhere.

Yet somehow, so many people still see AI as just a gimmick or buzzword.

Well, I’m here to tell you that these people will be the ones to fall behind in this technological revolution.

Millions of people across every industry are starting to use AI to become more efficient at their jobs and spend more time on the things that they love.

Being a part of the AI wave is no longer just about staying in the loop or trolling ChatGPT for social media clout.

It's about actual adoption and meaningfully leveraging the tech.

🔬 What the Science Says

Embracing AI isn't about outsourcing your brain.

It's a tag team, a dynamic duo where human creativity meets the efficiency of modern-day computing.

To understand its potential in our lives, we have to look at the science.

AI Smooths the learning curve

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research took over 5,000 employees working in customer support and equipped some with conversational AI.

The result? An average productivity increase of 14%.

While that doesn’t seem massive, that’s still pretty significant compounded over time.

More significantly, the study found that AI had the most significant impact—an average of 34%—on novice and lower-skilled workers.

Unsurprisingly, it had minimal impact on the productivity of experienced, high-skilled employees.

The researchers concluded that AI assistance propagated the best practices of highly skilled employees to the rest of the workforce, improved customer sentiment, and even increased employee retention.

I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely taking that AI assistance.

How you use it matters. A lot.

Don’t forget that AI is a tool. It’s not the be-all and end-all.

You can’t just shove all your problems through ChatGPT and expect it to solve them for you.

A recent study done in partnership with Boston Consulting Group demonstrated this at a large scale in a fast-paced business environment.

The researchers assigned 700 consultants various tasks, only some of which were “within the capabilities” of the AI.

It found that for complex knowledge tasks (the example was writing a memo to the CEO of a company about how to drive revenue), those using GPT had negatively impacted outcomes.

To quote the study, these consultants performed worse using GPT because they “kind of switch off their brains and follow what the AI recommends”.

So while AI can do a lot of things better than us, and we should absolutely leverage it where appropriate, a majority of business value is still driven by humans.

Regardless of how much better AI gets, these models don’t solve problems in a meaningful way unless they’re being used in tandem with humans.

And that’s not changing any time soon.

🚀 Take Action: 6 Ways to Leverage AI

AI is incredibly powerful.

But its value is largely determined by how we use it.

Here are 6 ways AI can increase your productivity and automate your life.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of the mentioned tools or their developers. Just sharing based on personal use and recommendation.

1. Write Emails Quicker

I hate writing emails.

It sneakily eats up your time and is the epitome of “low value work”.

Save yourself some time by leveraging a Large Language Model like ChatGPT.

Train it on your old emails: Feed the model some emails you’ve written in the past so it can mimic your writing style.

Write good prompts: When writing prompts to generate emails, specify the tone of voice and level of professionalism you’d like to communicate.

Make it human: For the love of God, do not just copy and paste. Let the AI get you 85% of the way there, then take the reins the rest of the way.

2. Expense tracking

Remember when people used to go through every transaction and categorize them?

Well, AI can do this for you…for free.

If you aren’t using a tool like Rocket Money, you should be.

3. Research & Information Gathering

Computers are really good at traversing enormous quantities of information and extracting specific pieces from it.

In literal seconds, you can understand any topic at a high level, or answer a deeper question about a specific topic.

The age of jam packing your brain with information is over.

Offloading research and information gathering to an AI tool yields massive dividends in headspace, time, and productivity.

4. Natural Language, Well…Anything

With the rise of ChatGPT came a million GPT wrappers on just about everything.

Fitness apps, PDF’s, credit cards, fantasy football, you name it.

If it involves data in some form, there’s probably a way to filter and understand that data more efficiently using language.

As humans, natural language is the most efficient way of finding and internalizing data.

Use this to your advantage.

5. Smart Home Automation

Automating smart home appliances used to mean knowing how to code and spending hours debugging. Not anymore.

Platforms like Google Nest are starting to use generative AI to make this as easy as natural language.

Simply provide a prompt like:

And it will generate the code for the automation. Magic.

At the end of the day, AI is “just” another piece of tech; and while computers are amazing at computation and querying data, they will always lack that human touch necessary to make things, well…human.

So if you’re worried about AI taking your job, I urge you to read more about it.

And if you’re not paying attention to AI, hopefully this is a wake up call for you.

It’s never been easier to leverage the power of modern-day computing in our lives.

What are you waiting for?