The Pandemic will forever go down as a seismic game changer in our lifetimes – and our careers. The whole 2+ year experience took a lot of us, cost so many people loved ones and changed the work/life perspectives for so many. Now we face a new world where new rules are still being set (and those rules are likely to be no actual rules at all), but we are faced with no choice but to reinvent ourselves if we want to remain relevant in the business ecosystem of the future.
Or we could choose to ignore the change and pray we aren’t assigned to the dinosaur mausoleum anytime soon… it’s critical to prepare ourselves for the Great LLM-ization as AI becomes the interface to the Internet – and to physical business. LLMs will blow a hole in predictable high-cost operations like call center services and back office business process services, where their entire business models will eventually become defunct in the wake of technological and behavioral change.
Nothing is quite like it was before, and many of us struggle to adapt to these new uncertain surroundings.
Scratch that; most of us are struggling to re-adapt because there are no hard and fast business rules or norms these days. People guard their time religiously, especially when it comes to leaving the house for meetings, events, or office visits. Meanwhile, many corporates are wracked with politics and toxicity, as many workers panic about upcoming layoffs, driving peculiar behaviors from many. There are so many people existing at home for weeks on end, praying not to get the sack in the next round of layoffs because they know they lack energy and focus. This stress of uncertainty and unfamiliarity with the emerging work environment is having a major negative effect on our mental stamina. A lot of folks can barely make it through a full day of meetings these days.
We are living through a time of realization and reevaluation
While I am not going to advocate people to force themselves into an office (those days are pretty much over), I strongly advocate everyone refocus on adapting to the emerging work environment in order to re-energize themselves. The current environment demands you meet regularly with colleagues and clients, suppliers and ecosystem partners if you want to be visible and relevant in your market.
So bloody well do something about it! You need to find your mental stamina to hustle again, learn new ways of thinking, and prepare for the AI-dominant future.
Seven golden recommendations to reinvent ourselves and survive the onslaught of change
1. Accept the way business works has changed… and will keep changing. Accept the way things are emerging are not necessarily a mirror of the past… how we interact, invest our time, communicate, influence, focus, relax, etc. Get used to change and embrace it.
2. Prioritize meeting in person with clients and colleagues more than ever. Don’t fade away in your cave… the sheer scale of change AI and automation are bringing demands us to lock heads and learn together. There’s nothing wrong with working from home, but nothing is better than locking heads with our colleagues and other people to come up with inspired ideas.
3. Adopt an autonomous mindset. Make a real effort to stop yourself and others wasting time on tasks, interactions, and processes that can be automated. Focus your time on making smart decisions based on the data your systems and teams create for you. And developments in LLM models are adding a whole new dimension to the quality of data and insight at our disposal.
4. Change your narrative from ‘effort’ to ‘performance’. The only way to do more with less is to focus on measuring the outcomes we need and the smartest way to achieve them. Work with people who share that mentality. We need to focus on speed to data, not some trudging, painful set of activities.
5. Invest time in understanding AI tools and capabilities, or get left well behind. Don’t be a dinosaur and get with the program, as AI becomes our interface to the internet. AI is changing business as we know it… and at pace, both electronically and physically. Large Language Models are quick and easy to learn and don’t need a Ph.D. in mathematics or computer science. These tools are low/no code environments to develop new workflows or processes that threaten the old guard of programming, where technical staff loved building brick walls to prevent any meaningful business/IT collaboration. Now those walls are crashing down with the onset of these tools that can find patterns in large bodies of text which can predict the next word to write, create sentences and assemble paragraphs of coherent content.
6. Humans are ‘back in the loop’ as we have to prompt AI to get ahead of the LLM explosion. Prompt engineers are the fastest-emerging class of digitally fluent business/tech designers. We already using a conversational interface to ask questions and generate text with an LLM in 2023, and we will be unable to avoid it by 2024. Learning how to do this effectively will become a standard skill that all of us are expected to have. You must understand the mental maps to direct what your team does, as LLMs dictate how we interface with the Internet and run our businesses.
This skillset needed to build effective conversational interfaces is not steeped in NLP or deep learning, instead these LLM orchestration skills demand constant self-improvement in the following:
- Asking questions (design prompts). ChatGPT, for example, never gives exactly the same response twice. Learn how to prompt your LLM more intelligently with both short and long prompts to compare quality and accuracy. One of the key benefits of GPT4.0 is the ability to absorb very long prompts (as large as 1000s of words) at rapid speed.
- How to iterate. Try asking the same question in different ways, exploring multiple responses to the same prompt, and then comparing the results, detecting bias, and being aware of it.
- Evaluating responses is critical as much of what we have experienced so far is how ChatGPT gets it wrong. By asking questions in different ways, discovering contradictions, and asking to self-assess is a key aspect of GPT4 that has improved significantly since the prior version.
- Eradicating bias by constantly expanding our understanding of bias in LLMs. ChatGPT, for example, is biased based on the underlying approach used to build the LLM and the data used to train it.
- How to generate new ideas (Generative Thinking). The big challenge now confronting us as we approach the Great LLM-ization is to constantly seek new ideas beyond the constraints of our current LLM. You should ask ChatGPT to summarize, synthesize and find the contradictions in the result it creates. Invest time in learning how conceptual blending approaches are evolving.
7. Understand the significance of the technical improvements of GPT-4… it’s the beginning of the Generative Enterprise.
HFS’ Generative Enterprise articulates the pursuit of AI technologies based on Large Language Models (LLMs) and ChatGPT to reap huge business benefits to organizations in terms of continuously generating new ideas, redefining how work gets done, and disrupting business models steeped in decades of antiquated process and technology.
We are learning the new version of GPT is ten times more powerful, cites sources, understands dialects, and even has eyes… just click here to learn more.
Posted in : Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Autonomous Enterprise, Buyers' Sourcing Best Practices, ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs), OneEcosystem, OneOffice
