You Are An AI Tool
Our new Chief Looming Board Member Lucia likes to “pop by” every Tuesday at 10 a.m. for an extensive grilling of our poor, distraught Executive Team.
It’s really quite a show. After several rounds of yelling, she inevitably leaves, but not before doing this weird stroll/spin through the Top Deck—the research and development part of our business that also houses the executive suites—where she drags the pad of her left index finger across the various do-dads, desks, computer monitors, VR equipment, and heads of any unwary engineers as if checking for dust.
Which is exactly what she is doing. And Lord, you don’t want her to find any dust. She’s explosive, to say the least.
Just last Tuesday she was incredibly pissed because we hadn’t laid anybody off. Apparently her contemporaries in Board Member Land were all lauding their various mass layoffs, talking about efficiency and productivity and future-readiness and all those other code words for "improve our valuation because we messed up at the managerial level,” and poor Lucia was left to quietly sip her Anejo Old Fashioned without a profiteering remark to make.
Which left her fuming mad.
We explained to Lucia that we hadn’t made any managerial mistakes, that we established goals, made decisions based on those goals, came up with strategies to support the decisions, and certainly knew where we were going, so there wasn’t any reason to lay anyone off. But still she pressed, so we compromised by telling her we’d incorporate a bunch of AI tools to improve our valuation…ah, that is, improve the efficiency, productivity, et al. of our existing people in lieu of canning them.
This seems to have bought us a brief reprisal, although we suspect that Lucia doesn’t understand that while tools are important, they’re useless without that goal-decision-strategy-vision matrix thing in place.
Regardless, to not freak out our various teams, we created the following friendly guide, personalized for each of our employees, so they can better explore, adapt, and ultimately find success with their new seemingly benevolent AI robot overlords.
We Are All AI Tools: A Guide For Your Indoctrination
Dear [Employee #557B],
This guide was built by non-AI tools (we just don’t have time to learn them right now) to help you better understand which AI tools to learn and incorporate into your workflow, and further understand that these tools are not built to replace your bad self, but definitely to make you better at what you do. Which is not to say we think you’re bad at what you do. We just think you could do more of whatever it is you do, faster. And as the saying goes, more and faster is always better than getting yelled at by Lucia. At least for the time being.
Guide Point One: Take Your Garbled Mess And Run It Through AI Content Writing Tools
This one’s for ALL STAFF regardless of role, title, and all that. Is your heart racing, pulse pounding, and forehead beaded with sweat because what you have to say through Slack, email, or a Jira/project management tool ticket description is OH SO IMPORTANT, but not important enough for you to take your time and think it through before your write it? Well, that’s a problem, but considering the mess we’re in, use one of these tools until we can all agree to slow down to go fast. Note: all you must do is ask the robot to “Please re-write for clarity and conciseness” and *poof* garbled mess gone. Use this everywhere. Like it or not, all 21stcentury jobs require writing.
Guide Point Two: Eviscerate The Competition But Be Nice About It
Despite our altruistic mission and penchant for treating all humans with dignity and respect, we’re not here to screw around. Thus, hopefully your project involves someone tasked with detailed analysis of our otherwise ambiguous “market” as well as our dastardly competitors, so we can effectively take no prisoners. Figuratively speaking of course, sort of. If that someone is you, mess around with these tools to analyze market trends, understand competitive data, then organize and extract insights from market reports and competitors’ materials. What’s that you say? Oh sure, yeah, fine. We’ll pay for a class if you need it. But you don’t need it. Think of these tools as research assistants who won’t show up to work hung over.
Guide Point Three: Oh God Here We Go: Naming
The reason our relevant responsible parties come up with such lame names for our technical, software, instrumentation, and environmental systems is that naming is hard. Seriously, some things are just better to farm out to experts—you don’t have to do it all yourself. Although, uh, now you do. The following tools recognize effective naming conventions across industries, verify domain availability, produce dozens of options, and all sorts of other things that make naming our stuff way less group-thinky and impotent.
Guide Point Four: Nerd Heaven—Wireframes, Storyboards, And Blueprints
Here’s how this group of tools work. Start with a sketch (literally, a drawing…you thought you could draw when you were four…then society told you otherwise, but they’re wrong) and wind up with interactive wireframes and protypes for those crazy digital products. Yes, you’ll have to manually customize the results to make them your own.
Then storyboard the heck out of it so “stakeholders” (sigh) can visualize your design and thus be more susceptible to your pitch…and not complain later. Yes, you’ll have to balance advice from AI and own judgement.
If you’re all up in industrial design or have “engineer” in your title, you’ll dig all the above, plus the acceleration of your process while maintaining engineering integrity. Yes, the blueprint creation process still requires professional engineering knowledge and precision that current pure AI tools haven't fully mastered independently. Sheesh how many times do we have to come up with different ways to say the same thing?
A Final Hit: DANGER
Use these tools for suggestions during decision making processes, but don’t let them make decisions. Come on now, what are you thinking?
Be just as critical of AI outputs as you would be of your own ideas…er, other people’s ideas.
Use AI to refine, not DO. There are, quite tragically, no shortcuts.
Blindly trusting AI results means you’ll make everything boring and the same because that’s what everyone else is doing. We’re not here to do what everyone else is doing. Unless we see that they’re at that new Brooklyn Carreta Food Cart Pod, in which case we’ll totally have super jealous FOMO and end up doing what they’re doing.
Thank you [Employee #557B]. Now off you go.
Wait, one disclaimer. This stuff is changing at a truly alarming rate, so we’ll continue to support your meteoric rise to stardom by providing updated lists every 33 minutes, Monday – Friday, 6 a.m. – 6 p.m. EDT, understanding that we’ll miss some of the updates on Thursdays and Fridays between 3:45 p.m. – 6 p.m. because we’ll be at Crowley's Highland House for their killer happy hour. You should come.
We distributed this guide first-thing this past Monday morning…which was a terrible idea given no one understands what the heck is going on until at least 1:00 p.m. on Mondays. Which may explain the distinct lack of AI-generated thank you cards/letters we were expecting from our noble, intrepid employees. Maybe they’re still in the mail.
Regardless, our expectation is that our incorporation of AI tools will get Lucia off our backs and maybe show everyone in this hellhole of an office that they might as well get on with it and learn how to use this stuff. We’ve seen it before:
Horse → train → plane → Tesla.
Stick → revolver → machine pistol → finger lazer.
Guttenberg → typewriter → word processor → frenetic texting.
Prodigy → Internet → pornography → Nazism.
So it does absolutely no good to pretend a big change doesn’t exist, so why waste the energy fighting it?