Open a history textbook, and you’ll see drawings or old black-and-white photographs of settlers who rushed to California in the middle of the 19th century, hoping to find gold and get rich. We haven’t changed much: We’re still willing to dive into the unknown, and most of us still want to get rich. But now, we’re in a new, more civil, and evolved gold rush centered around artificial intelligence (AI), and it is global. As AI technology improves and interest in it grows exponentially, it will become an even more important tool for improving our lives and reaching our full potential.
Know More, Decide Better
For years now, the problem with data hasn’t been access. The issue has been how to find what’s relevant and organize it in a way that’s useful. Tools like ChatGPT are solving this problem.
Let’s say you need to speak at an event. You might prepare as best you can on your own. But if you load your previous public speaking information into an AI tool, it can help you organize and streamline your thoughts. It can also find flaws, inconsistencies, or gaps in what you are presenting. If you adjust your presentations based on those results, your future speaking engagements likely will be more effective. As a bonus, because your preparation time is more efficient thanks to AI organization and analysis, you have more time to spend with loved ones or taking care of yourself.
College is another area where AI can be influential. Suppose you don’t know what you should study. If you construct a profile and answer questions from an AI tool honestly, the tool could offer insights about you that could be hard for you to realize alone. Considering that your initial major and career choice can have lifelong ramifications, those insights are priceless.
Because AI can pull data together and help us understand what we don’t know, even about ourselves, it can greatly support better decision-making. It helps us to learn and, as a result, reach higher and higher levels.
Stay Safe
AI has helped us make strides toward a safer world by adding advanced safety and security features to many aspects of our lives, including our cars. Advanced braking is now a common part of many new cars that can save a life, or simply help one avoid an insurance increase.
My own driving demonstrates this. Recently, I was driving my wife’s truck, which has an AI-enabled braking feature. When I took a second to glance at the shoreline, the car in front of me suddenly stopped. The braking feature kicked in and stopped me from bumping into the stopped car ahead.
Additional safety uses of AI are all around us: AI can help you verify nobody is in your home or yard while you’re away. The watch you wear can tell you that you’re in danger of a medical emergency or contact emergency personnel for you. Leaders can use AI to monitor employee behavior or simulate work environments to reduce hazards. Doctors can use it to offer a diagnosis that’s just as good or even more accurate than they could give personally. If you examine all of these applications, it’s tough not to conclude that the collective health benefits of AI outweigh the risks.
Make Business More Competitive
In the past, it required much research for businesses to figure out who their competitors were and how they could improve their organizations to get ahead. Now, you can ask AI for that information, and it can give you a far more constructive response than you might have expected. It can be revolutionary in how it tests software, improving the creativity of developers and helping engineering teams produce far more than they could by writing code manually. AI also can automate tasks, analyze customer data, look for trends, and more. These elements can help teams hire where it matters and spend more time innovating.
With these realities, it shouldn’t be surprising that according to a Deloitte report, 79% of leaders have deployed three or more AI solutions, with 94% of organizations asserting that AI is critical to their success over the next five years. The key is to make sure that you customize your tools based on your business’s goals rather than bring in tools just because other companies with different objectives say they’re important.
It’s Only Going to Get Better (If We Just Let It)
Like all other technologies, AI presents a choice about how people can approach it. One side of this equation is to fear AI, reject it, and lock ourselves out of everything it could do for us. On the other side of the equation, however, we can embrace AI and the potential it has to get us to improve our education and well-being.
Opening our minds and embracing AI is a big reason for excitement. Future generations are poised to be more successful and intelligent than ever because of their access to AI.
Open your mind and join the race. It has already begun.
Don’t be late.