Someone who uses AI better than you will take your job.

AI is not a threat to your job but rather a tool that, when used effectively, can significantly enhance your work. As the saying goes, 'Someone who uses AI better than you will take your job.' This quote, which I have heard in the last few months, has motivated me to believe that AI is the technology revolution of our lifetime, a revolution that promises to enhance productivity and improve various aspects of our lives.

Of course, today's AI cannot replace you. As you work with AI tools, you will discover that you cannot trust them to work without your own peer review, which may lead you to downgrade their potential importance to your life. However, I'd encourage you to step back and change your mindset from what AI can't do for me to what I can trust it to do for me.

There is a philosophy that people only have so much energy to make decisions daily; some people take this so far as to have someone else pick out their clothes daily to conserve this mental energy. So, start thinking about the things you have to do regularly that just aren't that important, and you can hand them off to something that can't do as well as you... but maybe we can do it well enough that it is worth the savings in an effort to hand it off to an AI. A great place to find inspiration is to "Explore GPTs" or go to Huggingface and browse the LLM use cases people are working on, like travel & meal planning.

I started with Grammarly. I tell my team, "Leaders communicate." This AI tool has made writing these posts so much faster by dramatically simplifying my editing process and has improved my writing by pointing out common mistakes I make. It also plugs into every app and webpage you type into, so my communication has been enhanced in all aspects of my life.

I then went into the Gamma.app. This is a fantastic replacement for PowerPoint, which can also create documents and websites. It can transform my outlines into full presentations in seconds, so I can spend my time tweaking the content and graphics rather than on the actual creation of the basic foundation. A Gamma subscription also includes access to over half a dozen AI image creators. It has a 24-hour trial as well.

Lastly, I highly recommend getting certified in AI in general. Google's AI fundamentals certification is not just a recommendation but necessary in today's rapidly evolving technological landscape. It is relatively cheap and easy to get you started, and it shows serious interest in investing in your education.

My next focus is getting certified in prompt engineering to become even more productive with AI tools. At the moment, prompt engineering is the language of AI and the foundation for mastering AI tools. Reddit highly recommends learnprompting.thinkific.com. I am about halfway through the first module and am impressed with the content so far, so you may also want to look into it.

As a non-developer who has energetically pursued learning more about AI and asked people what they do to understand AI, I have been shocked at how relatively few people engage with AI tools. So, it is not too late to get started and be well ahead of your peers.