How To Prepare For Individual Skills Transformation In The Age of AI
Edition #092
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The Newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
How to de-risk your career in risky times
In this article, Jonathan Brill and Dorie Clark write about how, in your career planning, safe things which you believe are safe in your career may not always be correct.
Here are some critical thoughts from the article for you to read and reflect on:
When most of you are doing career planning, you often focus on the optimistic scenarios, which is not wrong, but you need alternative plans to mitigate potential risks.
Jonathan and Dorie offer a three-step framework, which is very powerful:
Identify Your Assumptions - It is essential to sit and write down your professional and personal goals. Think about an ideal scenario of a perfect career and start analysing what can go wrong or what are the assumptions that may not hold good - stay in a specific location, work for a boss you like, work in the company or in a field for life, etc.
Stress test your plans - They take an analogy from the military and apply it brilliantly, which you can apply as a career stress test using a 5-D Model - Deceive, Disrupt, Degrade, Deny and Destroy. Preparing for events or changes that can set you back and thinking about alternative plans is vital.
Defend against your vulnerabilities - Consider actively cultivating optionality in your professional lives. Find a new skill to learn every year and find a mentor to train yourself.
Read the entire article here. (This is behind a paywall)
Building Digital Out-Of-Home Experiences with Data, Automation and Algorithms
In this conversation, Srikanth Ramachandran, Founder and CEO of Moving Walls, talks about:
- His foray into the media business
– How Moving Walls is transforming the fragmented OOH media industry
– How billboards influence the sub-conscious mind
– Building the customer journey with omni-media
– Frameworks for CMOs to deliver contextual experiences
– Using first-party data for a real-world experience
– Building connected marketing, dynamic content and contextual data frameworks
– Learnings from his entrepreneurial journey
You can also listen to the entire podcast on:
Apple Podcast | Google Podcast | Amazon Music
Sam Altman - Key Note, OpenAI DevDay - OpenAI’s first developer conference
In this video, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, unveils what lies ahead for the OpenAI platform and the latest OpenAI features being rolled out.
Here are some thoughts and ideas to reflect on from this video:
There are over 100 million active users on this platform today, and it is rapidly growing. It is essential to understand how your customers or clients use this platform today to help you discover how you can use the OpenAI platform for your products and services.
Now, you can bring documents and databases from outside into whatever you are building, and they are also directly reducing the knowledge cutoff of the ChatGPT to April 2023.
How companies like Coca-Cola have partnered with Open AI to launch personalised AI-generated wish cards for Diwali. Exciting marketing applications are emerging.
Some powerful demos, testimonials and use cases are showcased. Think about where you could apply OpenAI tokens and interfaces in your business.
Once you have thought through some of the OpenAI applications that can help your business, try to set up a test bed for your experiments, learning and deployment.
Click on the above video link and watch.
How To Prepare For Individual Skills Transformation In The Age of AI
There is a lot of excitement and buzz about how AI will transform industries and how companies will do business with customers. In the same way, there is also enough fear about how jobs will get disrupted and disappear with the advent of AI. The coming of companies like OpenAI with its products and platform has only accelerated the pace of change.
Going back to history and studying transformative changes that happened in society often gives you enough clues and directions about how you can prepare yourselves as individuals for this change. Applying the 5-D Model that Jonathan Brill and Dorie Clark write about on this transformative change happening with AI can throw some interesting clues and questions for you to think about and contemplate:
When the transformation from an agrarian and handcrafted economy to an industrial economy happened in the 1800s- early 1900s, new materials, energy sources, machines and ways of organisation of work happened. The first two Ds - Deceive and Disrupt of the 5D model must have occurred to people at that time as all the data about their skills and businesses underwent a massive shift. Their work skills needed for the industrial economy shifted from craftsmen to machine operators. The ones who adapted, survived and grew, and those who did not were blown away by the change. The question to ask yourself is whether there is a shift back in work skills and business models from machine operators to craftsmen that AI is driving.
The next D of the 5-D model is the degradation in demand for specific skills, which were earlier in high demand in the pre-industrial era, leading to slower income growth for individuals. Start to closely assess if your skills are increasingly getting commoditised and if people with lower skills can do the same job with higher efficiency and productivity. Many skills of people in the pre-industrialized era who were handcrafting various goods and producing them became irrelevant. They could not earn the same income as earlier, as machines produced these goods at lower unit costs at an acceptable quality and speed. Just ask yourself, will coding continue to be a specialist skill in the future if you are in software, or how will creative work like design or functional skills like HR and customer service change? Will learning new skills of copiloting or collaborating with AI tools help you retain or improve your income over the long term?
The last of the Ds of the 5-D model- Deny and Destroy apply to this tsunami of change happening around you with AI. What can deny you from making this change? Is your company changing too slowly, or is your industry in a denial mode of this change overtaking them, or is your professional community too slow to embrace this change? Which specialist skills, technology or partnerships can potentially get destroyed due to this change if they don’t adapt and improve and do a critical assessment of how this can affect you personally and professionally? Ask yourself if we are moving into an era where technical skills will coexist, but they cannot outweigh human and conceptual skills, unlike in the past. So, if you are an engineer, doctor, lawyer, architect or designer - what skills do you need to augment yourself with AI coexisting in your profession?
‘Conceptual Thinking and Synthesizing’ Skills, which form the fundamental pillars of knowledge and applied innovation, may gain precedence over just ‘Managing or Doing’ skills in the emerging information-driven AI society. How you prepare yourself for this change will determine how you de-risk your career.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
De-risking your career lies in your own hands with mindful awareness of the reality of changes that are happening around you.
Real-time and conceptual experiences will be as crucial as ‘digital only’ virtual experiences to shape brand perceptions and transform purchase behaviour.
Using AI interfaces and protocols to aid learning and support decision-making is rapidly gathering pace and will soon become the industry standard.