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Video · Making AI useful

How to Master AI Powered Creativity in Just 13 Minutes

Jeremy Utley on the shift that separates people who get real value from AI from everyone else: treat it as a teammate, not a tool.

By Jeremy Utley (EO) · 13:20

Jeremy Utley beside a grid of AI app icons, with the words "You Are Using AI Completely WRONG".Watch on YouTube ↗ (opens in a new tab)

Jeremy Utley, who teaches at Stanford and wrote Idea Flow, explains why most people try AI, get ordinary results and give up, while a few get a great deal out of it. The difference isn't technical skill. It's orientation. People who treat AI as a tool ask it questions. People who treat it as a teammate coach it, give it feedback and get it to ask them questions. He calls the distance between what AI can do and what most people get from it the realisation gap.

This is the clearest thirteen minutes I know on why so much AI use stalls at "we tried it". Most organisations hand people a tool and wait for the productivity to show up. Utley's point is that the tool isn't the problem. The orientation is.

Two things are worth taking into your own rollout.

First, ask AI to teach you AI. Have it interview you about a real workflow until it can make obvious and non-obvious recommendations. No other software can do that. Excel can't teach you Excel.

Second, the gains go to people who treat it as a teammate, not a vending machine. His National Park Service example is a ranger with no technical background who, by the talk's account, built a tool in 45 minutes that saves the service 7,000 days of work a year. That didn't come from a better model. It came from a few hours of foundations and a different way of working with it.

If you are deciding where AI earns its place, watch this before you buy more licences.

Highlights

  • Underperformers treat AI like a tool. Outperformers treat it like a teammate: they coach it and give it feedback.
  • Ask AI to interview you about your work until it can recommend how to use it. No other technology can teach you itself.
  • The realisation gap: the gains are real, but fewer than one in ten professionals capture them.
  • A ranger with no technical skills built a tool in 45 minutes that saves the service 7,000 days of work a year.

From the transcript

Whereas the underperformers treated AI like a tool, the outperformers treated AI like a teammate. And shifting your orientation from tool to teammate changes everything about the kinds of outcomes that you can achieve working with generative AI.

TopicsAI adoptionLearning

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