134. How to Chat with Bots: The Secrets to Getting the Information You Need from AI | Think...
20 Mar 2024 (6 months ago)
Introduction to Utley & Gohar
- Jeremy Utley is an Adjunct Professor specializing in creativity and Entrepreneurship at Stanford and the author of "Idea Flow: The Only Business Metric That Matters."
- Keon Gohar is the founder of Geolab, former Executive Director at Singularity University, and bestselling author of "Competing in the New World of Work."
Motivation Behind the Study on AI's Impact
- Keon Gohar's business coaches teams to achieve complex business goals through team transformation practices.
- They wanted to investigate if AI could be a useful tool for problem-solving and idea generation.
- They conducted a study with hundreds of participants from various companies in Europe and the US.
- Half of the participants had access to ChatGPT during problem-solving ideation workshops, while the other half did not.
Research Findings on AI and Innovation
- Teams need to adhere to certain practices to outperform using AI, but most teams do not.
- Approaching AI like an oracle or search engine leads to underperformance.
- To achieve world-class results, AI should be approached as a conversation partner, which feels more like work and can make teams feel worse than those that underperform.
The Counterintuitive Nature of AI Assistance
- Rewiring brains to work differently with AI is challenging due to decades of experience with certain workflows.
- Teams that effectively used AI had to change their workflow and incorporate AI as a co-pilot, which was initially exhausting.
- The promise of AI can be intimidating, but it should be approached with enthusiasm and a willingness to learn.
- Expecting magic from AI without practice leads to underperformance.
- Treating AI like a conversation partner, asking questions, and providing context improves the quality of responses.
- Chat GPT is designed to give generic answers, so a conversational back-and-forth is necessary to get more specific and valuable responses.
The FIXIT Methodology for AI Collaboration
- FIXIT is a five-step methodology to enhance collaboration with AI.
- Focus:
- Clearly define a focused problem instead of a broad one.
- Ideate individually:
- Think about your knowledge and perspective before involving the team or AI.
- X Context:
- Provide sufficient background information or context to the AI.
- Ask the AI to interview you to gather context effectively.
- I Interactive iterative conversation:
- Don't settle for the first response from the AI.
- Engage in a back-and-forth dialogue to refine and improve the results.
- T Team incubation:
- Bring individually generated ideas and AI-assisted concepts to the team.
- Commission experiments or low-resolution prototypes to determine the best solution.
Enhancing Conversations with AI
- To maximize collaboration with an LLM like ChatGPT, download an LLM app on your phone and interact with it through spoken audio rather than typing.
- Upload prompts with audio messages and converse with the LLM as you would with a friend.
- Experiment with different LLM models, as they have unique characteristics and personalities. You can even feed their answers into each other to facilitate conversations among them.
- Avoid using Google as a metaphor for interacting with LLMs, as it limits exploration and idea expansion.
- Use voice apps while multitasking to make the interaction more convenient and efficient.
- Chatbots like ChatGPT can evaluate their own work and provide suggestions for improvement.
- ChatGPT can provide feedback on the length and readability of your writing, suggesting ways to make it more concise and engaging for readers.
The Final Three Questions
- To fully utilize chatbots like ChatGPT, consider asking it questions that require emotional human decision-making, similar to what you would ask a partner or friend. This approach helps demonstrate the potential of chatbots in assisting you.
- Keon admires Peggy Newton, a Wall Street Journal columnist skilled at condensing big ideas into a few words, and Sam Horn, author of "Tong Fu," who teaches effective word usage and omission for clear communication.
- The three key ingredients for successful communication are:
- Active listening: Pay attention to the environment, context, and the other person's potential thoughts.
- Understanding your audience: Know who you are speaking to, their priorities, and goals.
- Defining your end goal: Determine the desired emotional response from the audience and structure your message accordingly.
- Effective communication, conversation, and critical thinking enable us to collaborate with AI chatbots as better and more creative problem solvers.
- Visit "how to fix it. a" and check out Kean and Jeremy's article in HBR for more information on their work.
- The podcast is available on YouTube and various podcast platforms.
- Subscribe, rate, and follow the podcast on LinkedIn and Instagram for updates.
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