What is an AI-First Mindset? [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 (What is an AI-First Mindset? [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: What is an AI-First Mindset? [AI Today Podcast]

Author: AI & Data Today
Duration: 00:10:07

Episode Shownotes

An AI-First Mindset refers to a proactive and strategic approach to integrating AI into all aspects of your life both personally and professionally. It involves prioritizing and using AI as a key driver for decision-making, innovation, and problem-solving. In this episode of AI Today hosts Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer

discuss what having an AI-First mindset means. Continue reading What is an AI-First Mindset? [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 Mulch.

00:00:26 Speaker_02
And I'm your host, Ron Schmelzer. You know, as AI makes its way into our daily lives, people are using it for all sorts of things. Of course, everybody's using generative AI tools to write their emails or write their reports and do their homework.

00:00:42 Speaker_02
help with work of all sorts of types, and of course, generating images. But people are realizing, of course, that AI tools can really help speed things up, make things more efficient, maybe do some sanity checking.

00:00:54 Speaker_02
And we even talked about this on a recent episode, where AI is even changing the way people do searches, where it used to be that if you wanted some information, it used to be that not so long ago past, you'd just go into Google or your favorite search engine and type a search and you'd find the answer.

00:01:09 Speaker_02
But now people are just asking their LLM for direct answers and it's changing people's behaviors. And as it changes people's behaviors, it's really changing people's mindsets.

00:01:20 Speaker_02
You might realize that people are just starting to act differently with AI and maybe that's giving them some advantages. So we're going to talk a little bit about that.

00:01:28 Speaker_02
And we'd of course like to hear from you as well, because many of you are using AI in some really new and interesting ways. We want to hear what that's like in the real world.

00:01:38 Speaker_01
Exactly. And that's actually what inspired us for today's podcast, where we're talking about an AI-first mindset and what it is.

00:01:45 Speaker_01
So for our listeners that have taken our CPM AI training and certification, you know that we talk about, and for podcast listeners as well, especially ones that

00:01:54 Speaker_01
have been here since the beginning when we started all the way back in 2017 we talked about AI winters and what they are and what caused them and kind of where we are now with this AI spring and so we say that we now have these AI first organizations and we go into detail about what that is but now we're starting to see the emergence of

00:02:15 Speaker_01
AI-first mindsets for individuals. So we want to spend some time on this podcast to talk about what that is, some of the key characteristics of that, and then the benefits that you can get as well.

00:02:25 Speaker_01
And as always, like Ron said, please do reach out, subscribe to AI Today, and then let us know if you have this AI-first mindset or if you're working towards it and what exactly you're doing.

00:02:35 Speaker_01
So first let's frame it with what an AI mindset, an AI first mindset is. It really refers to that proactive and strategic approach to integrating AI into all aspects of your life. So all, you know, personal aspects and professionally as well.

00:02:50 Speaker_01
It involves prioritizing and using AI as a key driver for things like decision-making, innovation, and problem solving. And, you know, also talking about some of those soft skills that we had talked about in some previous podcasts.

00:03:03 Speaker_01
And so I encourage you to check those out.

00:03:05 Speaker_01
But an individual with an AI-first mindset not only embraces AI technologies, but also knows how to appropriately use them, what they're best suited for, and they continually seek out opportunities to leverage AI to enhance their capabilities, optimization, and also really to just achieve better outcomes.

00:03:25 Speaker_01
We talk about this idea of augmented intelligence a lot. where you're not using AI to replace what you're doing, but help do your job better.

00:03:34 Speaker_01
And that really is coming to life now, where you can have AI help you with every single part of your daily life.

00:03:42 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:03:42 Speaker_02
And I think, you know, one of the ways that, you know, that someone is having an AI first mindset, or at least very close to one is if you observe them and let's say they just open up their laptop and their home screen, you know, when they, if they open a browser is not say a search engine, it's like an LLM.

00:04:00 Speaker_02
you know you might see opening i might see claudino thropic and like hey that's interesting you know the first thing that they see when they open up their laptop or the order they open up a browser is is is an lm we started it suggests a shift in the weather thinking like i'm gonna start my day i'm gonna start my interactions first,

00:04:21 Speaker_02
with an AI conversation, right? And that's a very potent thing because it already suggests that they're doing certain things. And one of those big characteristics is they're just integrating AI into their daily life, their daily work, right?

00:04:34 Speaker_02
Of course, if this is their work machine, then yeah, it's part of their daily work, but it might be on their personal machine. And This idea of putting AI first, it does a couple of things.

00:04:47 Speaker_02
The first thing it really does is it just starts to get you to realize very quickly what AI is good for. Because you're using it all the time, right? You can see when AI is working well, and you can see when AI is not working well.

00:05:01 Speaker_02
And because it's part of your daily life, you can say, oh, I know just inherently where AI will speed me up. It'll augment something or it'll enhance something I'm doing.

00:05:09 Speaker_02
And then therefore you're like, I am not even going to realize like, oh, I should go use this AI tool. And you have to like change the way you're working. It's basically become the way you're working. So it's inherent in your operation.

00:05:22 Speaker_02
It's a very interesting way of thinking about it, right? So, you know, you might be using it to say, automate some tasks where maybe you drag and drop some spreadsheet or some tasks you need to do. The AI system goes out and chews on it.

00:05:36 Speaker_02
We've done that quite a bit lately, which is great. I needed to summarize some information that was in a bunch of spreadsheets. I'm like, why am I going to do this manually? I'm just going to throw it into the LLM.

00:05:46 Speaker_02
I'm going to ask it some questions on the data, of course. You know that the AI system is not perfect, so be aware of its limitations, right?

00:05:53 Speaker_02
But you kind of get the sense as to, you know that it's going to be good at certain things and not so good at other things. And, you know, that's that reflex, right?

00:06:01 Speaker_02
You're building that, like, oh, you just inherently know what to do and it's there, so you just use it instead of these other tools.

00:06:08 Speaker_02
And I think the other thing is that when you have this sort of default behavior of starting with the AI system and then using non-AI systems when you know that the AI system is not a good fit, it's kind of the flip of how it usually is because you're starting your life usually in non-AI systems and you're involving AI when you think it might be a fit.

00:06:27 Speaker_02
This other way, basically, it's treating it like the non-AI systems are the exception to the rule. So you can sort of say, well, I'm just going to assume it's going to be good for things, and you're going to realize where it's not good for things.

00:06:37 Speaker_02
Then you can be like, yes, I need to use this tool because the AI system is not good. And that also sort of drives you to be more data-driven, right? Because then you can say,

00:06:47 Speaker_02
You know, you're going to use the information, you know what's going in, what's going out. You know that LLMs are not super smart entities. They're just tools.

00:06:57 Speaker_02
And you know that garbage in is garbage out and you start getting better yourself at filtering data.

00:07:02 Speaker_02
It was a while ago, Kathleen and I were working with an LLM and we realized that to get the results we wanted out of it, we had to make some changes to like a spreadsheet or a database system. And we just had to, so it's like data issues.

00:07:13 Speaker_02
Then we put the data the way that the system would be more easily able to process, and we got the results that we wanted out of it. So we were spending more of our time with the data side rather than on the other parts, which machines were good at.

00:07:26 Speaker_01
And we always say, these are data projects, and 80% of your time is going to be on those data tasks. Well, guess what? It was for us. So we definitely understand that. But to have this AI-first mindset, some other key characteristics are

00:07:41 Speaker_01
proactive learning and skill development. And so what we mean by that is that you're continuously seeking to understand AI, all of the different tools and the applications and the potential impacts that they can have as well.

00:07:55 Speaker_01
So whenever we're starting projects, right, we obviously are big advocates of CPM AI. And so we say, well, what problem are you trying to solve? And then what pattern or patterns of AI are you trying to solve?

00:08:06 Speaker_01
So really understand how that can impact your life as well. Because yes, AI is a tool. And so having that AI first mindset is, how do you use this tool to help in aspects of your everyday life?

00:08:19 Speaker_01
But know that it's not going to be a perfect fit for every single thing. And that really is part of that understanding

00:08:27 Speaker_01
AI, understanding where it's good, understanding maybe, you know, where you can get better, but then also with your skill development. So you're going to have to actively be learning new things.

00:08:37 Speaker_01
You know, we always talk about this growth mindset and that you want, if you don't know it, it's just you don't know it yet. You still can

00:08:44 Speaker_01
And should be a lifelong learner so you're going to want to be actively learning these new Ai related skills and you're going to have to have an emphasis on data and data analysis and definitely get better at prompt engineering and continuing to learn.

00:09:02 Speaker_01
you know, best practices when it comes to prompts and how to stay relevant and how to collaborate. You know, and then we talk about, well, how do you, how do you get better at prompt engineering? Well, don't work in a bubble.

00:09:13 Speaker_01
I mean, usually that's, that's a life skill. Don't suffer in silence. Don't work in a bubble, but get out there and see how others are using it. If there's prompt libraries or repositories, or if there's ways that you can continue to learn.

00:09:26 Speaker_01
And that really also plays nicely into mastering the soft skills, which is what we've talked about on previous episodes, and I encourage you to check them out.

00:09:35 Speaker_01
We have a whole soft skill series, and this is around creativity and critical thinking and embracing curiosity, you know, problem solving,

00:09:45 Speaker_01
all of those soft skills that really are important and you do have to master them, especially when it comes to generative AI and prompt engineering, to get the most out of these prompts.

00:09:56 Speaker_01
And so one of the soft skills of collaboration is incredibly important. You need to know how to be a collaborator and how to collaborate with others so that you can get better.

00:10:06 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's the irony as we keep talking about this and we talk about AI systems and soft skills is that the more you use AI, the more you have to be better at the things that AI is not good at. Because AI is going to do other things.

00:10:19 Speaker_02
So that means you have to be better at creativity and you have to be better at problem solving. Critical thinking, you have to be better at collaborating with other people and communicating.

00:10:28 Speaker_02
All the things that humans are good at, that machines still are not that good at, right?

00:10:32 Speaker_02
There's a reason why you have to be better at critical thinking, because AI systems still hallucinate, or they don't answer the question properly, or maybe you're not even applying AI in the right way. AI systems can't solve those problems.

00:10:44 Speaker_02
We're not yet at the U-level of the D-I-K-U-W pyramid. They don't really understand that. So, ironically, you have to get better at it because the machines are able to do some of these other things.

00:10:55 Speaker_02
So, being in that AI-first mindset ironically means that you have to master this. If you're not good at the soft skills, you won't really be able to truly gain advantage from AI systems because you'll be

00:11:07 Speaker_02
just cutting and pasting stuff from an AI system. And then your colleagues are going to be like, what the heck are you doing? This isn't right. And then you're going to be like, you're not going to be successful. So you want to be successful.

00:11:17 Speaker_02
And I think that sort of ties into some of these other things. If you want to have that AI first mindset, as you start developing that reflex for AI,

00:11:24 Speaker_02
is you start just inherently using it and knowing what it's good for and what it's not good for, you start to understand what the system's limitations are. You just inherently know AI systems will be good at this, and they will not be good at that.

00:11:36 Speaker_02
And when someone asks you to do something, you can say, oh, I will use an AI system because it's great for this. Or if someone says, I want to use AI for that, you'd be like, no, no, no. Trust me. It's not good at that. Don't ask AI to do math.

00:11:46 Speaker_02
It's not a math machine. Just use a calculator. Trust me. I've done it 100 times. It doesn't work. Or it inherently doesn't make sense.

00:11:55 Speaker_02
And I think the other thing that's sort of the parallel to that, because people talk all the time about the ethical and responsible and trustworthy issues when it comes to AI.

00:12:03 Speaker_02
We have issues of not just hallucination, misinformation and disinformation, but you have issues of bias, informational bias.

00:12:11 Speaker_02
You ask for a picture of something, next thing you do, it's like white guys in suits and you didn't even say anything about it, or whatever the issue is. You know what I'm saying?

00:12:19 Speaker_02
As you keep using NAS systems, you will see and you will spot these issues, or you'll see issues around, hey, I can't upload my information. to this system because I know that it might be used for training data.

00:12:32 Speaker_02
You start developing the reflex of knowing what information should be put into an AI system, what information should not. These are issues of responsible use. You might even be able to start to spot the deepfakes. You might just get so good at AI.

00:12:45 Speaker_02
Actually, already people have gotten enough experience to know when something is chat GPT generated. You can just look at something now and you can be like, I have this feeling, this just feels AI generated, right? You know what I'm saying?

00:12:58 Speaker_02
You only get that reflex after you start using AI systems enough. And all of this comes down to this ethical, responsible, and transparent use. People talk about how teachers need to put AI detectors because they don't want kids using LLMs for it.

00:13:13 Speaker_02
But you know what? These teachers are going to see it enough. They're just going to know it. They don't need technology. They can just know when that's happening. So I think this is part of that AI first mindset.

00:13:22 Speaker_02
You just start building a reflex, not only for the capabilities of the system, but also its limitations and some of these other issues.

00:13:29 Speaker_02
That's why having this mindset is so useful, because it makes you much better companion, if you will, with AI in your daily life.

00:13:38 Speaker_01
Exactly. So when you embrace this AI-first mindset, obviously there's going to be benefits from this, and that's why you want to do it. So it really does allow you to take full advantage of AI's capabilities. And again, this is a reflex.

00:13:55 Speaker_01
So this is something that you're going to have to learn over time. But eventually, with enough practice, things become habit, right? And now, instead of using search engines, for example, maybe going to chat GPT will be your first.

00:14:09 Speaker_01
And so you can do these things that help make it a habit. So Setting a large language model as your home screen allows you to go there first, rather than having to type and search for it. Usually it's always take away the friction, right?

00:14:24 Speaker_01
The more you take away the friction, the more it really becomes a better reflex and you're going to want to use it. So take advantage of all of AI's capabilities. And so that includes enhanced productivity.

00:14:36 Speaker_01
If you're integrating AI into your daily life, your daily workflows, you know, professionally and personally, then you can achieve greater efficiency and really start focusing on maybe some of those high value tasks or tasks that you just really honestly enjoy and don't need to use AI for.

00:14:54 Speaker_01
And it also does give you that competitive edge because if you stay on top of these trends and these technologies and you use them, you get that competitive advantage in the job market, in a business landscape, and it also, again, just helps in your everyday life.

00:15:08 Speaker_01
We say that there really is a low risk for failure when it comes to generative AI to just play around with it and just try, right? You know,

00:15:19 Speaker_01
you're not going to be using up lots of resources or wasting a lot of time and money and needing to pull a lot of different people into that project, you know, by just writing a prompt. That's not always the case with other technologies.

00:15:31 Speaker_01
And so we say, just try and see what the outcome is. And also we're big on comparison as well. You know, do that A-B testing. How long does it take you to write an article on your own? And how long does it take you to write an article where you use

00:15:45 Speaker_01
you know, chat GPT or another large language model as an assistant, right? So don't have it write it for you, but help brainstorm and outline and maybe write different sections.

00:15:55 Speaker_01
And then you can go in and edit it and put it in your, you know, feel and your tone. But how much time does that save? And as you continue to do that, and you're really measuring these results and you're measuring that ROI, right?

00:16:07 Speaker_01
We always talk about that return on investment. Then you can see how having this AI first mindset, having that reflex really is helping.

00:16:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, and I think that's basically really the sum of what we're sharing here, which is that it took a while for people to build their web reflex. You know, I keep going back to this. I talked about this on a previous episode.

00:16:26 Speaker_02
We talked about the way people change their search habits now, moving from the web to And I think that's part of it because it took some time for people to build that web habit.

00:16:37 Speaker_02
You know, it might have been like, you know, in the early 90s when you were looking for information, what did you do?

00:16:41 Speaker_02
You went to a library, maybe you asked people, maybe you used a phone book, you know, yellow pages, whatever it was to find information that you needed. That was your reflex.

00:16:50 Speaker_02
But after a certain amount of time, people rebuilt this reflex, like, I need information. Now it's like, I need information. The reflex is, open up a web browser, do a search, right? Or on your mobile phone or whatever, ask Alexa or Siri.

00:17:02 Speaker_02
These are all, you know, part of your reflex. Now you're like, that's just the first thing you think about. And that's basically what we're talking about here. This AI-first mindset is developing this AI set of reflexes.

00:17:12 Speaker_02
And we know what the web is good for. We know what the web is not good for. We've sort of already built this idea of,

00:17:19 Speaker_02
of understanding the limitations of information that's posted on the web we know what might be advertising and what might be sponsored we might not want to be biased information coming from a new source we don't trust social media we've all kind of been there right and.

00:17:35 Speaker_02
we're getting there with AI. And I think that's the thing. We're building this reflex. AI is really here to stay, despite what people are talking about, its use and not use in business. It's true.

00:17:46 Speaker_02
We haven't yet proven its total value, but the tool is here. And so for us to make the most use of it, I think developing these reflexive behaviors is good. If you don't like AI, that's fine.

00:17:56 Speaker_02
There are plenty of people who haven't liked the internet for a long time and don't like the internet still, refuse to work with even computers. I'm not saying these are positive or negative traits, but it takes time for technology to develop

00:18:10 Speaker_02
It's usage patterns and yeah, the early web was honestly not that good. So I could totally see why people in the 90s would have looked at it and been like, this internet stuff is a disaster. Why am I going to use this? Right.

00:18:23 Speaker_02
But over time it developed and then it became more useful. And I think the same thing is happening here in the AI world. Hopefully we can leave you with some insights.

00:18:32 Speaker_02
But as I said in the beginning, we want to hear from you because people are using AI in all sorts of interesting ways. This is a conversation with you, our community. We'd like to hear from you.

00:18:41 Speaker_02
So send us an email, send us a message, connect with us on LinkedIn, share with us some of the ways you're using AI in some maybe obvious ways or some not so obvious ways. We want to hear what your AI-first mindset is all about.

00:18:52 Speaker_01
I know, maybe we'll collect a little repository and share it with everybody so that they can learn from others, right? Collaboration, a critical soft skill. So with that, definitely subscribe to AI Today if you haven't done so already.

00:19:07 Speaker_01
We'll link to some of the other podcasts that we discussed in the show notes, and I encourage you to go back and check them out. Also reach out to us. We're very active on LinkedIn.

00:19:14 Speaker_01
You can connect with us there, or you can shoot us an email, 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.

00:19:30 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?

00:19:43 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.

00:19:55 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.