Your AI Use is Not My AI Use
AI adoption is supposed to be hard.
I was very lucky to get exposure to management early.
Being a management consultant requires you to plug into a new company and get work done without any formal reporting influence from day 1. Often the people that were excited to hire you aren't the people you are working with. I also got to be managed by many, many different people as projects lasted 2-3 months at a time. I learned a lot from their successes and mistakes. My first chance to manage another consultant happened in my 2nd year as an Analyst in McKinsey (too easy, McKinsey’s hiring is just too good!). Then, I became a Product Manager – an funny role, no direct reports but still a “Manager” by name. Then Principal Product Manager managing another PM and finally as a Founder, managing people I've hired directly.
I feel pretty comfortable working with people now. I'd by no means call myself a leadership coach but I know not to be an asshole and still get things done and you'd be surprised how many managers set the bar lower than that.
Management takes time to learn and more so because you have to develop a management style that suits your strengths and adapt it to each organization and person you are working with.
As I talk to people about how to better use AI I'm realizing it’s hard for one person to help another.
You can teach someone to use spreadsheet software with a 10 hour course. I'm not sure a course like this exists for AI, certainly not outside the narrow scope of a single job in a single company.
Learning how to use AI well is like learning management. It’s a long journey that we are all early on. Our use of it has to be shaped in line with the way we like to work and our strengths. There are aspects of AI that are similar to tools such as choosing a provider, configuring it, etc. but the day to day delegation decisions and feedback loops are much more akin to management than using a tool.
This presents a new type of problem for companies looking to “align” AI use. It’s a tool so we want to use the same tool, the same configuration, the same context. But it’s also management and everyone wants to do it their own way.