At a recent lunch, an entrepreneur friend of mine turned to me and asked, “Lorraine, am I being left behind?” This statement reflects how many individuals currently take into consideration artificial intelligence.
The excitement is definitely high. Artificial intelligence will help us solve problems big and small, from diagnosing cancer to fighting climate change or just by helping us be more productive.
But alongside this excitement there’s also fear. Fear of not understanding the technology. Fear of creating a mistake. And, as within the case of this entrepreneur, fear of missing out.
If you will have compassion, you aren’t alone. In a recent survey only 32% of business leaders said their company had already implemented AI on a big scaleWe’re all still attempting to work out find out how to bring the advantages of AI to our teams – and what success looks like.
If I’ve learned anything in my 20 years at Google and 30 years in promoting, it’s that we shape technology by the best way we use it. And that process is not linear.
When it involves AI, we’re all still testing and learning find out how to translate this technology into value, so now’s the time for anyone to experiment and mess around. AI tools are already available—and no advanced training or coding skills are required to become involved.
But right away, not enough of us are doing that.
It starts at the highest. As leaders, we want to take motion and use AI tools at work – and in our personal lives. We have to experiment with as many alternative use cases and solutions as possible.
AI tools can now find that one email from my kids’ school with all of the necessary dates, summarize entire work email threads, give me feedback on how our creative work is being received, or gift me with an excellent line of poetry.
We also need to present our teams permission to innovate. Ideas come from in every single place, and sometimes from where you least expect them. Encourage your teams – whether in operations, marketing, sales or development – to check out different AI tools.
At Google, we try to foster a culture of curiosity where people try things, fail, and take a look at again—and frequently share what works and what doesn’t. Our Dogfooding program is a technique we encourage everyone to make use of early product features. At a hackathon we recently hosted, people assembled teams from across the corporate and imagined entirely recent ways to make use of AI.
There’s no improper solution to experiment. For example, an organization can start by identifying a selected pain point—whether it’s an e-commerce retailer using generative AI to put in writing product descriptions at scale or a graphic design platform using AI to hurry up video creation.
To encourage others, we recently published a listing of how over 100 firms use AIWe also just launched a course to assist everyone from small businesses to nonprofits and governments leverage AI.
Like lots of us heading to Cannes Lions, I’m particularly fascinated by how AI will change marketing. Some imagine that AI will threaten the very nature of creativity. I disagree.
Creative people have long embraced major technological changes. They use them as a chance to try recent things, often long before others, and ultimately fuel our imagination. When creativity and technology come together, we will achieve extraordinary things.
I’m lucky enough to work with a few of the very best creatives on this planet. Even they’ll let you know that a blank sheet of paper may be terrifying. So leave the fear of that first terrible design to an AI. Spare yourself that. And then be sensible.
AI can even save marketers countless hours. At Google, we use AI to create multiple versions of an ad within the time it used to take to create a single version. And we use AI to translate ad copy and deliver campaigns in 150 countries.
Like any tool, AI has its limitations. That’s why humans are still essential. When we use AI to translate ad copy, an actual person reviews each bit before it’s published. AI can enhance the brilliance and judgment of our teams, but it might probably’t replace them. It may also help us do higher work, faster and at scale, but not without strong human judgment.
So what would I tell my friend who owns a business today? That that is only the start.
The way forward for AI shouldn’t be fixed. It will probably be shaped by our actions today. It is as much as all of us to be curious. This curiosity is what drives us to amazing creativity and makes our work great.
It is rare that we have now the prospect to shape the longer term together. Today is certainly one of those moments.
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