I recently heard an outstanding observation from business consultant James Pursey during a sales seminar about using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
He said, “If you can’t do it yourself, you probably shouldn’t be using AI.”
The only modification I would make is to say that if you can’t do the task excellently yourself, you should probably avoid using AI.
Pursey gets at the root of many issues associated with the terrible use of large language models (LLMs) in selling, marketing, and customer service.
We’ve all been the subject of the most horrible LLM-generated emails, social media conversations, and AI-generated posts. Many businesses have fallen victim to these and been wooed into complacency.
These tools eliminate all the work we don’t want to do — all the tedious tasks we struggle with. People suggest they don’t have to struggle with outbound emails anymore because they aren’t good at them, and AI can handle the task.
What's the solution?
Pursey and his colleagues discussed the need for deep expertise to get the most out of these tools.
To get the best result, you must use sophisticated prompts to understand the issue more deeply and to refine and tune the responses.
To do this effectively and efficiently, you must have a high degree of knowledge about what you are trying to do, who you are trying to do it with, what works, and what might not work.
Those with low knowledge and capabilities cannot evaluate if they are getting the best from the LLM. To them, everything looks good, even though, based on what we see them doing, it is wretched!
Those who are well-trained use these tools as thought partners to complete debates and as tools that can help them generate new ideas.
However, to do this and get quality responses, each of them has to have great expertise in what they are doing.
They can identify the technology's flaws and ‘hallucinations’.
They can also refine the prompts to improve them and more narrowly focus the answers.
These LLMs, such as ChatGPT, can be tremendously helpful — but only if you can engage them in discussions.
Key areas of focus
So, what does this mean as we look to leverage these tools with the most significant impact?
We need to continue to focus on improving the expertise of our staff, not just in our products but also in our customers, their businesses, and how they recognise the problems we solve.
We need to develop our staff’s curiosity in how they engage customers in talking about their problems and dreams and enhance their ability to do clever prompt engineering to get the most out of these fantastic tools.
Critical thinking goes hand in hand with curiosity. We need to engage our customers in deep, personalised discussions about their challenges and be able to carry on the conversation.
We leverage the same capabilities in working with the AI tools to help us plan what we might do with those customers.
We need to develop our staff’s problem-solving and project management capabilities.
This is where our customers struggle, and we are, perhaps, the best at helping customers navigate the process.
With this knowledge, AI tools can help us tremendously and automate much of our work, but only if we know how.
Finally, we must recognise what LLMs and AI can’t do.
Then, we must make sure we are experts at doing those things. This is where the true power of humans and technology come together.
Where do we go from here?
Pursey was very polite and proper in his statement: “If you can’t do it yourself, you probably shouldn’t use AI.”
I’m a little more crude: Idiots using AI will produce crap at the speed of light!
We have a choice! If we want to leverage these tools' real power and promise, we must develop the capabilities of our sellers, marketers, managers, and leaders.
We have the opportunity to amplify what we do and how we do it, connecting with a much more significant impact on every customer engagement.
Final consideration
The more we use these tools to do the work and think for us, the faster we lose our ability to exercise human judgment, creativity, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving.
As a result, we create less value within our businesses and with our customers. We lose our competitive edge, and our customers will see less need to engage us in working with them.
These tools are very powerful and can amplify our creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving capabilities - or they can allow us to dumb ourselves down.
The choice remains in our hands.
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