Are you and your team asking the right questions about AI?  

Chat GPT in particular, but AI in general, has exploded in the public consciousness in the past few months.  It’s a reality that we have more AI tools available than ever before.

But I’ve noticed that a lot of teams have struggled to figure out what to do with AI. One reason for this stands out to me as obvious, but also actionable. Many teams aren’t asking the right questions about AI.  This stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about how a lot of the AI works.

Artificial intelligence encompasses two concepts.  There’s artificial narrow intelligence and artificial general intelligence. Once you understand the difference, you can start to ask the right questions about AI.

A common question I hear is, how can I use AI on my team?  That’s a pretty good starting point, but it’s a little bit too general.  

I’ve also heard some business leaders ask questions like:

Can I transform my business with AI?

How could we automate everything?  

How could we make AI run our business without needing humans?  

The problem I see is that this is pie in the sky thinking. These questions want AI do everything. This is not just ambitious, it’s also fictitious. 

And so we go back to this misunderstanding of artificial intelligence. Artificial narrow intelligence is machine learning that is applied to a single problem.  

Think of tools like, Grammarly, that is working on using AI to improve text and writing. You could think about web search, self-driving cars, or weather forecasting tools.  All of these are examples of AI applied to a specific problem.  Within a specific problem, AI is potent and useful.

The other type of artificial intelligence is artificial general intelligence.  This is where you can think about replacing human thinking.  General intelligence is being able to think like a human, or even more powerfully than a human.

Artificial general intelligence is not here.  Chat GPT, grammarly, Tesla self-driving cars, none of these are general intelligence.  These are narrow intelligence. General artificial intelligence needs more time to develop. Some researchers doubt that it is even possible.

This distinction can drive us to ask better questions about AI on our teams. Instead of thinking, “how could AI take over my business?” a better question might be, “how can we use AI to prioritize incoming support tickets?”

You might ask “given our history with implementation projects, how can we leverage AI to better forecast delays?” or “how can we identify profitable leads before we write a proposal?” What you’re doing in these cases is driving down to a narrower problem.A solvable problem. As you do so, you’re putting yourself in a situation where you can maximize the impact of AI in your business.

As long as our tools are narrow in their intelligence, we need to be specific with how we want to apply AI. We need to take advantage of the effectiveness of AI in solving narrow problems.  Don’t start with an attempt to transform everything all at once.  Look for tools that can help solve tangible and specific issues that your business faces.

Ask the better questions. That’s going to drive you to have more success integrating AI at your organization.