Setting priorities in an AI-enabled world

2024/06/24

Back in 2017, when I was leading a 10 people software development agency, I was still coding most of the time instead of focusing on business development.

I failed at setting my priorities straight for so long until I read this:

« What do you need to stop doing in order to do what matters ? »

I wish I had done more of the following:

• Saying No
• Letting things burn (like crashed databases)
• Skipping meetings (even those I organized)
• Being late on (some) deliveries

You all know the motto: « What makes a good leader is the ability to decide quickly »

What I didn’t integrate at the time was the « removal » part of the decision process: The things I needed to stop doing.

Now, with the rise of GenAI, we might think we should produce more and faster:

• AI-generated sh*tty blog posts
• AI-generated mind-numbing videos (well ok, I like the meme ones)
• AI-generated useless avatars

We have our priorities completely upside-down. As a collective, do we aim to waste everyone’s time ?

We have a tremendous opportunity to save time and focus on what truly matters.

Don't we ?

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PS: If you don’t know where to start to save (human) time, here’s my top 10 use cases

Customer experience & Sales

• Customer support requests processing
• Capturing requirements and writing specifications

Procurement & Legal

• Writing requests for proposals (RFP)
• Contract terms extraction and GDPR compliance assistance (PII)

Marketing

• Processing insights from reviews (competitors & own products)
• Hyper customization at scale

IT

• Data cleansing operations
• Writing code

Company-wide

• Finding relevant information in a large knowledge base
• Writing Standard Operating Procedures