Soft Skills for AI: Why Collaboration is Key for AI Success [AI Today Podcast] AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast AI Today Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Insights, Experts, and Opinion

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Soft Skills for AI: Why Collaboration is Key for AI Success [AI Today Podcast]) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (AI Today Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Insights, Experts, and Opinion) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

View full AI transcripts and summaries of all podcast episodes on the blog: AI Today Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Insights, Experts, and Opinion

Episode: Soft Skills for AI: Why Collaboration is Key for AI Success [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:10:59

Episode Shownotes

Soft skills are increasingly becoming important for AI, and in particular Generative AI. Collaboration can accelerate learning, creativity, and innovation. In this episode of AI Today hosts Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer discuss the critical skill of collaboration. Why Collaboration skills are needed for AI In this episode we discuss

why collaboration skills are important to improve your interaction with AI systems. Continue reading Soft Skills for AI: Why Collaboration is Key for AI Success [AI Today Podcast] at Cognilytica.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_00
The AI Today podcast, produced by Cognolitica, cuts through the hype and noise to identify what is really happening now in the world of artificial intelligence.

00:00:10 Speaker_00
Learn about emerging AI trends, technologies, and use cases from Cognolitica analysts and guest experts.

00:00:22 Speaker_01
Hello and welcome to the AI Today podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Molch.

00:00:26 Speaker_02
And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer. We've been on this series recently where we've been talking about the fact that as AI systems get better and better at doing many of the tasks that perhaps they

00:00:39 Speaker_02
we haven't been as good at before, but also some of the more complicated tasks, like doing complicated analyses and really helping understand some of the hard-to-understand subjects like science and math and engineering, we're finding, ironically, that it's the soft skills that we as people need to be better at, not only just to interact with other people, but to interact better with the machines themselves to get better quality results out of those systems.

00:01:06 Speaker_02
And if you haven't heard in our previous episodes in this series, we've talked about why critical thinking, which is a very underrated skill in general, but why critical thinking is so important with AI, because you need to be able to understand how to process and handle the information that comes back from AI systems.

00:01:22 Speaker_02
And similarly, we explained how communication is really important, because the only way that you're interacting with these systems, especially generative AI systems, is through prompts, which are communication, and they're communicating back to you.

00:01:34 Speaker_02
So bad communication means bad prompts, means bad results. And we also talked about creativity, which is like learning how to understand different approaches to getting results.

00:01:44 Speaker_02
And that's incredibly important with AI, because if you try the same things over and over and over again, and you're trying new things, you might find that you get worse over time. You're not getting the results. So creativity is really important.

00:01:54 Speaker_02
Well, we're going to continue, because there is a fourth soft skill that we want to tell you that, again, if you get really good at this soft skill, you will also get really good with AI.

00:02:04 Speaker_02
And of course, AI can even help you improve your soft skills as well.

00:02:07 Speaker_01
Exactly. And if you haven't done so already, subscribe to AI Today so that you can get notified of all of our upcoming episodes. And also we'll link to the previous soft skills in the show notes.

00:02:17 Speaker_01
But for today's podcast, we want to focus on the soft skill of collaboration and why that's so important.

00:02:24 Speaker_01
And so, as always, we'll take it from both perspectives about why good collaboration skills are needed for you to get benefit from AI systems and generative AI systems, and then how generative AI and AI systems can help you be a better collaborator.

00:02:43 Speaker_01
So when it comes to collaboration, it can really accelerate learning, creativity, and innovation. And of course, these soft skills are not done in bubbles or silos. You bring in multiple soft skills when you're doing this.

00:02:56 Speaker_01
And so we want to focus each podcast on just one particular one. but know that they all kind of do blend together.

00:03:02 Speaker_01
And collaboration skills really are critical for navigating AI development complexities and being able to work with teams, being able to learn from others. These really are important.

00:03:12 Speaker_01
So one way that collaboration skills are needed for AI is that you can collaborate with others to improve your prompts. Prompt engineering is still fairly new. People haven't been doing it for all that long, maybe especially in professional settings.

00:03:26 Speaker_01
So we always say, don't be afraid.

00:03:29 Speaker_01
First off, don't be afraid to try different prompts and to just, you know, get out there and do it because the risk for failure really is so low, but don't be afraid to ask for help and seek feedback from others as well.

00:03:40 Speaker_01
Maybe from peers in your community and your networks, from colleagues at your organization.

00:03:46 Speaker_01
Really try and get different perspectives from others on how they're using prompts because that's going to help you refine your own prompts and it could spark new ideas and different ways of using prompts and using AI in general that maybe you had never thought of.

00:04:03 Speaker_01
And then also it can keep you up to date with the latest prompt techniques. We talked a lot about prompt patterns in previous podcasts, but it also just helps you learn new strategies.

00:04:14 Speaker_01
So collaboration, you know, really is critical to accelerate your learning, your creativity, and your innovation.

00:04:21 Speaker_02
Yeah, and one of the ways that you can implement this particular soft skill of collaboration is sharing. We're talking about prompts, and of course, there's more to AI than generative AI.

00:04:30 Speaker_02
There's obviously all sorts of other ways that you can use AI, and collaboration helps with all of them, whether you're sharing examples of machine learning models and applications of them in various different places.

00:04:41 Speaker_02
But it really does help with prompt engineering because different machine learning models at different versions, maybe they perform better and worse than others.

00:04:49 Speaker_02
One of the things we talked about in our prompt engineering best practices series, which you should listen, another six episodes or so that just focused on prompt engineering, is we talked about doing what's called hack and track, which is basically tracking

00:05:03 Speaker_02
how the various different patterns, prompt patterns are working for you on different machine learning models, maybe with different techniques you're using, maybe different specifics.

00:05:14 Speaker_02
It's good for you to track it on your own, but it's a lot better to be tracking it with your team. This is where collaboration comes in.

00:05:20 Speaker_02
Somebody else might have tried a particular pattern that's working really well right now, and you might say, oh my goodness, I can use this for my own application. We haven't really seen a lot of it yet. I think this is still very new.

00:05:32 Speaker_02
Nobody has set up, say, group spreadsheets or tracking databases or wikis or things like that where they can share. But we hope to see more of that.

00:05:39 Speaker_02
But we are seeing this, I would say, more in, say, social media, where people are posting, let's say, on LinkedIn or on Reddit, saying, hey, here's a couple of prompts I'm using that are really working. That's actually kind of a form of collaboration.

00:05:52 Speaker_02
doing it with everybody, and you're saying, here's a problem that I'm using, I think it's working really well, and somebody might come back and say, well, here's a tweak that I did that makes it work better, or here's a problem I'm having.

00:06:03 Speaker_02
That's why collaboration works, because if you're just an island working by yourself, you won't benefit from the successes that other people are having.

00:06:09 Speaker_02
So that's like the first step, is if you get better at collaboration, you get better at sharing, not only does it make it better for you, it makes it better for others, and it improves the value everybody's getting.

00:06:20 Speaker_01
Exactly. And we've also seen that, you know, when you collaborate and also expand maybe your ecosystem a little, you can get different perspectives on how to leverage AI systems.

00:06:31 Speaker_01
So you can collaborate and get different perspectives from maybe different groups of people, different industries, different roles as well, so that you can you know, really kind of get that holistic perspective, right?

00:06:44 Speaker_01
We always talk about bias when it comes to AI and bias in data. And so we want to make sure that we really are collaborating with a wide group of different people so that we can understand what's going on and we can say, okay, how are you using this?

00:06:59 Speaker_01
Also, when you focus on, you know, you can focus on horizontal or vertical, we always say. And so how do you focus on you know, a specific use case that can span multiple different industries? Or how do you focus maybe deeply on one industry?

00:07:14 Speaker_01
And even if it's not the industry that you're in, you can still say, okay, well, at a high level, how are people using prompt engineering in this industry? And what problems are they solving with this? Or how are they using AI in general?

00:07:26 Speaker_01
And that's where collaboration really is key because it also helps bring in all those different perspectives, those different roles, those diverse backgrounds that you might not otherwise get exposed to.

00:07:36 Speaker_02
Yeah. And one other thing that you can do when you're collaborating is you can just learn in general where the AI applications are a good fit.

00:07:44 Speaker_02
Because you might hear from folks who say, I tried just these AI applications, or maybe specifically I tried some LLM, some prompt-based approach, and it's working really well here, and maybe someone's saying it's not working at all well here.

00:07:58 Speaker_02
Maybe you'll hear some examples of maybe somebody got into some trouble, perhaps. Maybe there's some issues that they had, maybe some regulatory problems. These are things you don't want to learn as an island, right?

00:08:08 Speaker_02
It's nice to, first of all, those are failures, and we always say learning from failure is great. You know, trial and error, as I like to say, you know, nothing wrong with trial and error, but it's better to learn from other people's failures.

00:08:19 Speaker_02
You know, better to not have to suffer all the pains yourself. And of course, that means collaboration. That means being in places where other people may be slightly ahead of you trying things. Maybe they're succeeding, so great, learn from them.

00:08:31 Speaker_02
But maybe they're failing in certain ways, so also learn from them as well. And so part of this collaboration is really learning about those different use cases, those different examples, those places where applications may or may not be a fit.

00:08:44 Speaker_02
the changing regulatory landscape, where also you might be like, well, it works well for you in this country, but, you know, we're in this country and we can't do it that way. And so that's part of it.

00:08:54 Speaker_02
So I think just in general, hopefully we covered, you know, being better at collaboration yourself does help improve all of what you're doing with AI. And you can say that may apply for things that have nothing to do with AI.

00:09:05 Speaker_02
That's probably true, but it does, it is very more impactful with AI than it would be, say, for mobile applications or social.

00:09:13 Speaker_02
It is true that you can learn about how to do social media marketing better as well by learning from others and by collaborating, right, just like everything else.

00:09:21 Speaker_02
But when AI is constantly changing, every day something new happens, every day there's some new innovation, and so therefore it's even more important with AI because you can quickly become obsolete.

00:09:32 Speaker_02
If you learn something, even just a couple months ago, if you're not learning from others and you're not hearing from others, you may find that what you know is no longer relevant.

00:09:40 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's a really great point, too. I mean, these tools are changing so rapidly. Honestly, Ron and I will even joke, you know, from one day to the next, they can be changing.

00:09:50 Speaker_01
And if you're not staying on top of that and talking with others and collaborating with others, you really can fall behind.

00:09:55 Speaker_01
also why it is so important, you know, we talk about this idea of hack and track, but it's this idea of really documenting what you've written as a prompt. I mean, even Ron and I do this, and we say, okay, well, what prompt did you use?

00:10:06 Speaker_01
Oh, okay, this didn't give me, you know, exactly the results I wanted. Let me tweak it just a little, and then we continue to iterate and refine, right? Collaboration here.

00:10:15 Speaker_01
And then what do you know, before you know it, a few iterations later, it's getting us what we wanted. And so because we were collaborating and kind of talking through it, then we were able to create a much better prompt.

00:10:26 Speaker_01
So on the flip side of this, we also say, well, guess what? You can become a better collaborator with the help of AI. And so how can you do that?

00:10:35 Speaker_01
Well, AI, and particularly generative AI, because I think that that's really what's so accessible for everybody these days, and that's why our Soft Skills series is really focusing on that, it has the potential to significantly enhance collaboration and human collaboration between a variety of different folks.

00:10:54 Speaker_01
So we've seen it with enhanced communication among colleagues and teams. Generative AI is being able to assist in a variety of different ways. One, we talk about translation, right?

00:11:06 Speaker_01
Natural language processing and language translation, that conversational pattern of AI, where it's able to break down language barriers and it's enabling more seamless communication than you could before.

00:11:17 Speaker_01
Also, we've seen things like AI chatbots or virtual assistants help with streamlined communication as well and be able to give you quicker answers. So maybe, you know, you're in a meeting and you want to enhance that communication,

00:11:29 Speaker_01
You can go in you can also you know use it as that augmented intelligence tool where you're able to help it prompt with different ideas so that your. you know, really being able to kind of collaborate.

00:11:42 Speaker_01
And we also talk about how some of these skills blend together. So maybe that's communication and also bringing in your critical thinking. So say, you know, what results did it give me and how do I work upon that and move forward?

00:11:55 Speaker_01
But, you know, they really all do blend together. And so collaboration is, is important. And that's one way we're seeing it.

00:12:02 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, it is after all hard to collaborate if you can't communicate. So these things do work together. This is kind of funny because I was hearing, you know, we're talking about translation here.

00:12:11 Speaker_02
And, you know, we think in terms of language translation, you know, like spoken languages, but also some people pride themselves in being able to translate business speak to say technical speak or marketing speak to sales speak or something like that.

00:12:26 Speaker_02
And it's kind of funny because I'm wondering if people are building like little you know, GPT bots that basically say, okay, somebody in the business unit said this, can you translate what it really means for me in my IT universe?

00:12:38 Speaker_02
Or you can have the flip. Somebody in the IT universe said this, please translate what it means for me as a business person.

00:12:45 Speaker_02
And, you know, that's kind of cool because, again, it's a communication skill, but it's helping with the collaboration because the purpose of the communication is obviously to get everyone to work together.

00:12:54 Speaker_02
Well, one of the other ways that we're really seeing AI systems really help with human collaboration is an idea generation and brainstorming and helping with that.

00:13:06 Speaker_02
Now, some of that, of course, relates to the creativity skill, which is funny because we talked about how creativity in itself is important. And yes, being creative and having it help AI make you creative individually is important.

00:13:19 Speaker_02
You should listen to our podcast on this. But here we're talking about creativity as a group. Here we're talking about collaborative creativity, I guess, when you're trying to come up with new approaches to do things.

00:13:29 Speaker_02
And I think that's one of the cool things about AI in general, is that sometimes people get stuck in thinking things the same way. And, you know, you think like, well, AI is just pattern matching.

00:13:39 Speaker_02
Won't it just give me generic stuff that I've already thought of? The answer is, well, yes, if you ask it for generic stuff. But maybe you could say, we've already come up, we're trying to do an idea for, say,

00:13:51 Speaker_02
I don't know, a slogan, a marketing slogan. And you could say, we've already come up with these ideas. Can you provide some other ideas?

00:13:58 Speaker_02
Now you're doing prompt engineering with better practices here because you're not just asking for something general. And you could say even, give me these other ideas.

00:14:06 Speaker_02
Now compare those other ideas to the ones that our team provided and say how maybe ours are or the suggested ones are better, or whatever, and some different factors. And maybe you can even evaluate all of them and then come up with a recommendation.

00:14:19 Speaker_02
We've tried this recently. It's kind of cool because I guess it just exercises a different part of how the LLM works, the evaluative part, I guess, versus just the summarization part.

00:14:30 Speaker_02
Because when you're asking for ideas, what it's usually doing is just getting content from the various parts of the internet and just summarizing them, writing bullets or something.

00:14:38 Speaker_02
But if you wanted to say, do compare and contrast, what it's going to do is it's going to

00:14:42 Speaker_02
especially if you tell it to act like a persona, like act like a social media marketer, it's going to say, well, what would a social media marketer say about these ideas and how would they compare and contrast? Because that's what it's going to do.

00:14:53 Speaker_02
It's kind of cool. I don't know. I think it's an underrated feature, actually, of LLMs to have it do things like come up with alternate ideas and rank them. And of course, that's great in a team setting because

00:15:05 Speaker_02
different people like to think they're right. So, you know, having an AI system in the middle could help, you know, provide other ideas in general.

00:15:13 Speaker_01
Yeah. One more point to argue. Depends on how teams work, but it is great, you know, and it is just an additional tool, right? So we always say use this as an augmented intelligence tool, and that's really what it is.

00:15:26 Speaker_01
Another area that we're seeing is, you know, with the rise of remote work and remote teams, maybe you're dispersed throughout different continents, you work at a multinational organization, we're seeing facilitation among remote collaboration.

00:15:41 Speaker_01
So when teams aren't all in one place, you know, sometimes you can get together and you can kind of brainstorm together and there's something to be said for that. But when you're dispersed, you still can do that now.

00:15:52 Speaker_01
And so with the help of AI and generative AI, we've seen it enhance virtual, you know, with virtual collaboration tools. Also now maybe it's making meetings that weren't in the past more interactive and more productive as a result.

00:16:06 Speaker_01
So you're able to take this technology and you're able to better collaborate

00:16:11 Speaker_01
You can collaborate now with the help of AI and then sometimes even non AI tools, but specifically with the help of AI and you know you can get in there and you know as Ron mentioned you can use different prompts and talk about that so all of these really do help bring.

00:16:26 Speaker_01
you know, all of this together. And I think that that's why it's so important and we talk about it in this series.

00:16:31 Speaker_01
We've also seen, you know, when you work in different time zones and things like that, sometimes collaboration can be a little bit hard, but now, and yes, you can do it offline, you know, with specific tools and have kind of those collaborative tools, but now with the help of AI, how do you even, how do you step this up a level and do it even better?

00:16:50 Speaker_01
That's really what we want to say here.

00:16:51 Speaker_01
All of these soft skills together combined really do help make you, one, better at prompt engineering, better at getting what you want out of generative AI, and then also it helps you as a human with these soft skills.

00:17:06 Speaker_01
Really, it's kind of understanding it. Even when we have these conversations with people, they're like, wow, I never thought about it that way. Wow, I never realized being a better communicator would help.

00:17:15 Speaker_01
wow, I didn't realize critical thinking was so necessary so that I could get better prompts or that it would help me evaluate the responses that I was getting and maybe not accept it the first or the second time. Same thing with collaboration.

00:17:28 Speaker_01
Maybe you didn't understand just how important being able to collaborate with others were or how broadly you could think about that collaboration

00:17:38 Speaker_01
where it doesn't necessarily need to be near peers, but it could be people outside of your industry with how they're using it. We always say, don't be afraid to get out there.

00:17:46 Speaker_01
Don't be afraid to talk to others, to ask those questions, to see how people are using different tools and technologies, because there's a lot to learn from it. And it's just going to help you get better.

00:17:57 Speaker_02
Yeah, and it's kind of interesting because we are definitely seeing the impact of AI on collaboration in general, in this space, both ways, of course, you know, not just people with good collaboration work and doing better with AI.

00:18:08 Speaker_02
But like, you know, we've seen, we've been, like all of you, we're on all these meetings now, and it's kind of interesting how, like, just over the past few months,

00:18:15 Speaker_02
When you join any sort of virtual meeting, Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, whatever, there will be now most people have a bot that's going to join those meetings and usually for things like note-taking and summarization and things like that so that I guess they'll have the action items or maybe they missed something.

00:18:32 Speaker_02
But I could totally see in the future that those bots would be more active. What I mean by that is, let's say you can't make a meeting. There's an important meeting and you can't make it.

00:18:40 Speaker_02
It's like, well, maybe I could send my bot to make the meeting, not just to summarize the notes, but maybe I could say, hey, there's three ideas I want to share with the team.

00:18:48 Speaker_02
Like maybe you're doing some brainstorming session on some content or something. You could say, I know that the team's going to be talking about it, but here, my bot, why don't you share these three ideas with the team and just gather the feedback?

00:19:01 Speaker_02
No, the bot won't be able to argue for you. But maybe you could just say, the bot says, hey, the actual person would like to contribute these ideas, please give us your feedback.

00:19:13 Speaker_02
So what's happening is that we can participate a little more asynchronously, even in synchronous meetings, right, when we're all supposed to be together.

00:19:20 Speaker_02
And, you know, I think that's what I'm saying, this underrated skill, just like all the other social soft skills, all the creativity, collaboration, communication, you know, creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.

00:19:34 Speaker_02
You know, collaboration as part of that is just as important. And I think the impact of AI are going to be felt.

00:19:40 Speaker_02
So I think for all of you who are listening, sharpen up those soft skills, you know, improve them because it'll make you not only better as a human to human, but it'll make you better human to machine.

00:19:50 Speaker_01
Exactly. So if you haven't done so already, as I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, subscribe to AI Today so you get notified of all of our upcoming episodes.

00:19:58 Speaker_01
In addition to our series, we also have some wonderful interviews lined up and we have some new series as well that we're really excited about.

00:20:06 Speaker_01
In addition to that, subscribe to our newsletter on LinkedIn if you haven't done so already, and I'll link to that in the show notes.

00:20:12 Speaker_01
We provide various thought leadership in that newsletter as well as different events that Ron and I will be speaking at. Some are virtual, some are in person, so we always love to hear from our listeners. And reach out as well.

00:20:24 Speaker_01
Comment on our posts on LinkedIn, reach out to us. You can Connect with us on LinkedIn. I know many of our podcast listeners do, and we always love to hear from you.

00:20:33 Speaker_01
Or just email us, info at Cognolitica.com, about different topics that you'd like us to address or, you know, feedback that you have on some of our episodes. I know that we recently spoke to a listener, and he loved the agentic AI topic.

00:20:47 Speaker_01
Definitely let us know how you at your organization, what you're doing, especially when it comes to AI. Everybody's a different path on their journey, a different stage in their journey. That's absolutely okay.

00:20:59 Speaker_01
We love to hear from people who are on all different stages of their journey because that's how you continue to grow. Like this episode and want to hear more?

00:21:07 Speaker_01
With hundreds of episodes and over 3 million downloads, check out more AI Today podcasts at aitoday.live.

00:21:14 Speaker_01
Make sure to subscribe to AI Today if you haven't already on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google, Amazon, or your favorite podcast platform. Want to dive deeper and get resources to drive your AI efforts further?

00:21:27 Speaker_01
We've put together a carefully curated collection of resources and tools. Handcrafted for you, our listeners, to expand your knowledge, dive deeper into the world of AI, and provide you with the essential resources you need.

00:21:40 Speaker_01
Check it out at aitoday.live slash list. This sound recording and its contents are copyright by Cognolitica. All rights reserved. Music by Matsu Gravas. As always, thanks for listening to AI Today, and we'll catch you at the next podcast.