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Episode: The Need for Adaptability with AI [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:07:39

Episode Shownotes

Adaptability is the ability to adjust to new conditions, environments, or situations effectively and efficiently. It involves being open to change, learning quickly from experiences, and having the flexibility to modify one’s approach in response to shifting circumstances. In this episode of AI Today hosts Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer

continue with the soft skills series and discuss the soft skill of adaptability. Continue reading The Need for Adaptability with AI [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_02
Hello, and welcome to the AI Today podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Malch.

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And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer.

00:00:28 Speaker_01
And, you know, we've kind of been on a little bit of a series here, even though this is not an intentional series, but it's kind of interesting how topics sort of come about for the AI Today podcast, where we're really talking about a lot of like human factors.

00:00:40 Speaker_01
We call them soft skills, but you can also think of them as like human factors, the things that humans are just really good at, or the things that humans should be good at and better at. And, you know, how AI is either impacting those things.

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So in the past we've talked about creativity and AI. What does that mean? And critical thinking with AI and collaboration and communication.

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But there's lots of other things that we could think about because as we are trying to deal with technology in our daily lives and we're incorporating more and more of it, we have to change sometimes our behaviors.

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And one of the things that constantly comes up is that while humans might be good at certain things like creativity and critical thinking and collaboration and communication,

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There's actually, ironically, one thing humans are not that good at, that we really need to be better at, that machines can't be good at, and that's dealing with change.

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And humans, for whatever reason, we know that change happens and adaptability, which is the ability to deal with change, is a reality. But ironically, we need to get better at it. Most people are really bad at dealing with change, and change happens.

00:01:47 Speaker_02
Exactly. You know, people like they stay in their comfort zone and getting out of your comfort zone. Well, that's why it's called a comfort zone, right? It's comforting in there.

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And so when you get out of that, then you, you know, don't always feel so comfortable. And that's really where adaptability comes in. And so adaptability is, you know, being able to adjust to new conditions and environments and situations, both

00:02:10 Speaker_02
effectively and also efficiently. And so it involves being open to change, like Ron said. And this is changing your mindset, right? These are skills that you learn and can continue to learn over time.

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So you don't have to be perfect at it, but it's something that you should be acknowledging so that you can be open to change, that you can learn quickly from different experiences and also have that flexibility to modify your approach, especially with shifting conditions and circumstances and potential shifting outcomes as well.

00:02:40 Speaker_02
So when we talk about AI and the role that these soft skills play, we always first like to say, why are these skills needed for AI, especially when it comes to generative AI?

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And so that's been what our soft skill series has been on, because that's what people are really using right now. And we're saying these soft skills are making a resurgence.

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And it's important to understand what these soft skills are, why they're important, and how exactly they're being used, or why you need them.

00:03:07 Speaker_02
So when it comes to adaptability skills that are needed for AI, we always say, you know, there is a role of adaptability in creating effective prompts.

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So we've talked about prompt patterns in previous podcasts and how do you, you know, create prompts that are going to give you the results that you're looking for and you're going to have to adapt

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and learn over time, prompt skills, prompting best practices, and also being able to kind of iterate and adjust accordingly so you get the results that you're looking for. And along with that, you need to respond to AI's learning and evolution.

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So if anybody's been playing with any of these large language models, you know that they're just continually improving and getting better with time. So that means that prompts that may be worked

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a few months ago or on a different version may not be working today. And that's okay, but you need to understand and adapt accordingly. Otherwise, you're not going to get the results that you're looking for. Maybe the performance is going to decrease.

00:04:09 Speaker_02
And then you're going to say these tools aren't useful, and you're not going to want to use them when really you just have to be adaptive and understand that as these evolve over time, it's going to require prompt adjustments.

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It's going to require you to maybe learn some of that and continue to learn the capabilities

00:04:26 Speaker_01
Right. So that's sort of thinking about it at the, I need to work with AI and I need to have adaptability skills to be better at working with these AI systems for sure.

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But of course, there's the big elephant in the room, which is that you might need adaptability skills just to deal with AI in your workplace.

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the ways in which AI is being implemented for good or for bad, and that may change the way that you are working.

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I think that's where people get more conflicted because people see the value of AI, but then they feel fear for their jobs, basically, or they feel for their responsibility or the things that they're good at that they feel like, oh my goodness, machines are taking some of the things I'm good at or that I enjoy doing.

00:05:08 Speaker_01
Adaptability comes into play here, too, which is that You know, in some cases, if you have control over your situation and decide not to use AI, that's completely up to you.

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No one is telling you that you have to use AI for something, but there may be situations you're not in that control or that something is coming down the pike and you see AI is being used and you may make cause issues.

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One of the areas of having adaptability is, again, trying to embrace where AI will help you in your job, in your life, in your career, and embracing it to further what you need to do. You may make an evolution in your career.

00:05:42 Speaker_01
You may make an evolution in your job and the skills that you're doing. And so from that perspective, ironically, you might look at AI, how AI can help you become more adaptive. So you might say, let's just say, for the sake of argument,

00:05:57 Speaker_01
that you're involved in some project management activity, and the way you spend maybe half of your day is in things like documentation, like writing down meeting minutes and next tasks and things like that. Of course, it's incredibly important.

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You can't make progress on any project if you don't know where things are and who's doing what and what the next steps are. It's basic. But if someone says, hey, I can do all of that in a matter of minutes,

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with an AI tool, summarizing notes, summarizing next steps, then you might be thinking, oh my goodness, that's like half of my day. So what you need to do is think about like, well, what else can I do that would be higher value?

00:06:36 Speaker_01
Now you could try to ideate that on your own, but ironically, you could also probably even ask AI systems. you can involve AI systems to say, hey, my job is this.

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If I automate this part of my activity with using AI, what else can I be doing that's higher value? And that may actually help you advance your career. So there's always a flip side to these soft skills, if you will.

00:06:59 Speaker_01
Although adaptability, it's hard to say if that's a soft skill or not. It's just having that you know, innate ability to respond to change better.

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One makes you more resilient in your organization and in life in general, but also as Kathleen mentioned, helps you interact better with AI systems. So we can get back to that as well.

00:07:18 Speaker_01
We could say, okay, well, you know, how does these AI, you know, how does having adaptability help me work better with AI systems in ways that perhaps if I had, did not have adaptability would, would be not so helpful.

00:07:31 Speaker_02
Exactly. And so, you know, AI is helping with, you know, providing that adaptive or we sometimes, you know, hyper-personalized learning because you're able to have these adaptive learning platforms now.

00:07:44 Speaker_02
And so how can you, how can you learn and have, you know, content that is progressing and has preferences of everybody individually? And also we've started to see virtual AI coaches as well, and they're being used for a variety of different things.

00:08:01 Speaker_02
So some are being used for professional settings where they're helping give real-time feedback in areas like public speaking, where a lot of people struggle. So it can be adaptive and really help and be driven just towards that user.

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Or things like coding, we've also seen it in fitness and in sports as well, where you have virtual AI coaches who are really able to analyze things,

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fast in real time, maybe spot things that humans might not be otherwise able to see and provide those adjustments. So that's been really exciting because hyper personalization is something that both of us really are passionate about.

00:08:39 Speaker_02
And so now you're able to provide this at scale.

00:08:42 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's actually kind of a cool idea to have an AI coach who's kind of helping you. Of course, you know there's limitations. These AI systems are just trained on data.

00:08:51 Speaker_01
So really what you're doing is you're getting the benefit of all the internet's data that's been trained on that subject. and you're just having a conversation to extract that value. I know, I just summarized generative AI in all five seconds.

00:09:05 Speaker_01
But if you have that realistic perspective, it's not like some smart entity. You're just like, oh, I can leverage the benefit that this system has been trained on literally the whole internet.

00:09:13 Speaker_01
So the alternative would be me opening up 50 tabs and reading 100 articles. I'm even thinking about it even in our own personal lives. It's like, hey, yeah, I could use some executive coaching.

00:09:22 Speaker_01
Why don't I just open up a session here and I could say, I'd like some tips on how to deal with this and how to deal with that. And then you can refine it and you could be like, where did you get this information from?

00:09:32 Speaker_01
Because you know that it's coming from somewhere because you understand how AI works. It could say, oh, I got it from this site or I got it from this place. And you may be like, well, maybe that's good for, you know, one situation.

00:09:41 Speaker_01
But I have another situation or maybe that's good for a large organization. I want something for a small organization.

00:09:46 Speaker_01
Whatever it is, whatever your life is, it's kind of handy to have a little AI sidekick that has been trained on the Internet so that you can ask for assistance, because there's probably somebody else out there who has dealt with this situation like you.

00:10:01 Speaker_01
And and it would be great to get the sum of all of that content, that information that's already been out there, to help you so that you can get the best of it.

00:10:10 Speaker_01
It would be like, what do you call it, like a mastermind group when you're sitting with a bunch of peers and you're going to ask them, what should I do in this situation?

00:10:19 Speaker_01
You're probably going to get, quite honestly, a lot of the same sort of feedback you might get with an LM. Of course, in great mastermind groups, they're not actually answering the question you ask.

00:10:30 Speaker_01
They're really getting into what you really need to know. That's where the AI systems are limited because they can only answer what you ask.

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There's no like, well, I know you're asking about revenue or something like that, but what you really are asking is, how do I find customers? That's a harder question. And someone can say, I can cut through all the nonsense.

00:10:48 Speaker_01
I'll tell you something that you can't easily find on the internet. That is stuff that you will still be challenged with an LLM to get.

00:10:55 Speaker_01
But if you're looking at that sort of advice and get a kickback, this is, I think, goes to the point of adaptability. If you're looking to evolve with the change, ironically, involving AI in that could be very helpful to your career.

00:11:10 Speaker_02
Exactly. So lots of exciting things.

00:11:13 Speaker_02
Also, you know, when you're talking about being adaptive and enhancing creativity, so we, you know, we talked about creativity and a lot of these soft skills, we say this in all the episodes, but it really is true that they do

00:11:26 Speaker_02
play off of each other right you know you don't have skills in silos and so you can combine them all together and that's why we're presenting it as a series because we want to say.

00:11:36 Speaker_02
These are why these are so important and how they kind of do play together so generative Ai we know is really good at.

00:11:44 Speaker_02
creation of things of content creation of image creation and so how can you use that and then continue to adapt over time to make it even better and to have it fit your needs and maybe the look and feel of different projects that you're working on or different companies maybe that you work for if you're a consultant

00:12:05 Speaker_02
And we've also seen it with other creative aspects that AI can help with, such as AI-assisted music generation or video production and editing as well.

00:12:17 Speaker_02
So how do you continue to be adaptive and look at these tools that can compose music or edit videos or create visual effects by maybe suggesting some changes and being adaptive and being iterative

00:12:30 Speaker_02
so that you get that look and mood and feel and you know image or whatever the outcome is that you're really looking for.

00:12:39 Speaker_01
I think about it because it's like lately I've been doing a lot of slides, you know, and I'm thinking, why am I sitting here like looking for a design?

00:12:48 Speaker_01
It would be nice to talk about using AI and creativity and generative and having that AI reflex and of course being adaptive. I should just be able to type, please apply the template that's consistent with the company or, you know, please

00:13:03 Speaker_01
make this the most important, you know, like a highlight thing. Like, why are we not there yet? I don't know. You know, we'll get there. And I'm sure there are those tools. And I got to go out and look for it.

00:13:12 Speaker_01
I should probably ask the AI system, can you help me find those tools? And I'm sure it would help me.

00:13:15 Speaker_02
I know, then figure out, can organizations allow that? Nina, do you have permission? I don't know, but right, Ron, we do feel that.

00:13:24 Speaker_02
And, you know, we, in a previous podcast, very recently, our last one, we talk about the, what is an AI-first mindset for an individual?

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Because we've talked about companies now are AI-first, you know, they see it is so transformative that they're AI-first, but what does it mean to have an AI-first mindset as an individual? And we say, you know, never start with a blank page.

00:13:43 Speaker_02
So like Ron said, yeah, why are we starting with a blank, canvas here. Can we just have it help us and generate all of these things? And that is what it is all about.

00:13:54 Speaker_02
So with that, we will link to our other episodes in the show notes about the soft skills for AI. It really is important. We've had some really wonderful discussions around all of these soft skills, and we've written some articles on it as well.

00:14:07 Speaker_02
So reach out to us and let us know what soft skills that you've been maybe working on or looking to grow as you've been using generative AI for all different sorts of things. And you can reach out to us on LinkedIn.

00:14:20 Speaker_02
Rhonda and I are both super active on LinkedIn. You can also email us info at cognolitica.com. Like this episode and want to hear more? With hundreds of episodes and over 3 million downloads, check out more AI Today podcasts at aitoday.live.

00:14:34 Speaker_02
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00:14:48 Speaker_02
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00:15:00 Speaker_02
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.