The #1 topic of conversation over Christmas among my extended family was AI. I now have my 74 year old aunt, who is CEO of our family business (sharp as a tack and refuses to retire because she’d get bored) willing to try it out.
We talked extensively about what AI is good at (insight extraction from large amounts of data) and where it still needs to work (writing and hallucinations particularly).
We talked about the differences in outputs and usability from AI based on the user: someone who is an amateur, for instance, won’t be able to prompt as effectively, nor be able to scan the information AI provides to determine its accuracy, and prompt adjustments.
Industry experience and expertise still matters, but my aunt pointed out that it won’t forever.
She used the calculator as an example.
“You kids can put anything into a calculator to get the answer, but you don’t often know the math behind it. You can’t tell me why that’s the answer. And,” she added, “you rarely are asked to.”
That is AI’s path, too. It is a second brain, the way calculators and Google were before it. It is yet another tool we’ve created, just as important as the wheel, the arrow, or the microchip.
Most professionals I know use it, even if they don’t tell people they do. The primary use case is idea generation based on large data sets. It is wildly effective. It helps you keep pace with a type of hustle culture in which everything is a priority, and the best time to have it done was yesterday. AI can get you 70% of the way there in seconds…minutes if it needs some attunement (and goodness does it).
For 2025, I’m working not just on how I can use AI to generate better strategies and ideas, and improve my prompting skills, but how I’ll use AI to work less, too.
This isn’t a call for a shorter work week, or for picking up multiple jobs. No, we’re still talking about your standard 40 hours a week (and ideally not a second more).
This is a call, instead, for an inner shift, a mental slowdown that our human brains so desperately need.
AI is the tool for speed, for the connecting of the dots across a million data points. It can free us to take those ideas, and spend more time on them, to put more art into our work––if you define art (and we should) by simply putting more of yourself into it.
And to do that, all of us need time.
AI can speed up your production, and for business purposes, it likely will. But it frees you up to take a step back, understand the true sausage making of content, and then put more thought, time and creativity into the act of creating.
I’m sentimental this time of year, but it reminds me of my all-time favorite quote by Rebecca Solnit, which surely I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before: “The stars we are given, the constellations we make.”
AI can give us the suggestions, the strategy, the headlines, the angles (if you feed it the right information first!), but it is us who bring it to life. It is us who name the constellations, give them stories, and meaning, and seer them into lore.
Wow, what a time to be alive to get to focus on putting more life into our work. Less assembly line. More art. That’s what 2025 is looking like to me.
