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Last week, I found myself sitting in an AI for business workshop as a top performer and reminding myself I was just above passing grade. AI’s adoption has a short and steep learning curve now, and I often find myself measuring progress on the basis of the number of times I hit my usage limits. And each time I uncover just one other feature, I am reminded that there is just so much more.
The attraction of action
GenAI was so easy to pick up on that anyone could jump in and start reaping benefits. You have the feeling that you are automating, getting better content, doing more “upstream” tasks, and therefore you are a heavy AI user. Which you can be, no doubt. Except it is easy to feel great, even at the top of your cohort, when you look across other business owners or colleagues still navigating choppy waters with ChatGPT. Your best friend is Claude, and you nailed it. It knows everything about you and you kind of think you know everything about “it” too. But do you?
Action has made us move fast and set up projects, small agents, identify the tasks and use cases that we knew we wanted to get rid of since the moment they first hit our desk. The low hanging fruit of most white-collar jobs was so heavy that the benefits are quick to emerge. Nothing wrong with quick gains. The only downside to it is that quick gains mean we feel satisfied, even content. We got up fast in the AI adoption curve, and we feel comfortable saying we use it every day. Even proud. But frequency of use is not really transformation.
Action is a trap
I love action. Nothing like a good to-do list to get me through the adrenaline rush and writing in neon lights “Today I made huge progress”. Isn’t that why we do to-do lists after all, just to have the satisfaction of ticking items one by one or, better yet, to cross them out with a shiny marker? I have been through enough procrastination cycles to know that to-do lists can be the biggest trap to two things:
- They take time away from action
- They focus us on small steps, not big moves
Whilst every business does need everyday action which can’t be postponed, and indeed can be massively improved by adopting AI, small steps will hardly change the way we do business. And the reality is, AI requires us to change the way we do business (and yes, the way we live). If all we are doing is improving our existing steps, there is nothing truly new about those same steps.
Making steps faster is one thing. But skipping them altogether is, in reality what creates real shift.
Why did we stop if it feels like we are moving?
One of the reasons I created the Try AI for Growth podcast was to ensure I forced myself to keep learning, while also sharing quick actions that people could quickly translate into their business and their lives. It definitely put that pressure on me, and no matter how hard I tried, I kept thinking that I was talking about last month’s business. As I took a short summer break, I felt that I was both full of ideas and with no ideas at all for what I wanted my next experiment to be. In a way, I had shared plenty of use cases and even agent-related improvements, but I felt I wanted to up my game. I wanted to bring practical ideas of the real workflow transformation I have been advocating for in businesses.
To do that, I knew I needed to spend more time studying and learning new parts of Claude that I didn’t fully grasp yet. I knew I had to master skills, scheduled tasks, code and all the different connectors. And I hesitated. I knew so much, and I had so little time to learn. Taking action was just so much easier; why was my brain trying to pull the brakes on me? I was sure I was moving.
As I sat in that workshop, I knew why. My curve was no longer exponential. It was just a diagonal line: still moving upwards, but no longer accelerating. And if I had to guess, you might just have the same feeling. It is overwhelming to just think through the possibilities of what we can do, because we are now at a stage where we can grasp the potential of GenAI, so we stick to what we already know, because at least we are doing something.
Time to re-imagine
The real fallacy was how easy it was. If you talk to those taking their learning to the next level, or rather those re-imagining their workflows altogether, a pattern emerges: the first 80% feel remarkably easy. It is, however, the last 20% of the quality, of the change, of the transformation that can be tricky.
For me, it was so easy to bring AI into business, into the charity, into life, that I became addicted to doing it in the way I had always done it. Improve a part of your work and keep going with it. As I sat in this AI talk, I was looking for something to trigger me to make a bigger change. I wanted to start re-imagining some of the ways in which I operate as a solopreneur, some of the ways the businesses I work with can operate. And, eventually, so it did.
Rather than taking notes on what the speaker said, I wrote questions that came to mind as she spoke.
Mostly, I asked myself how to translate some of her provocations into my own business. As I got home, I opened a blank page and wrote everything that came to mind that I could change, that I could try. I committed to the extra courses I wanted to do.
And the next day, I built my first real automation before 10 am.
I did not plug in AI into my system, I created a new system.
The feeling of knowledge is often pervasive. It can give one a false sense of confidence. This applies to most things, not only to AI. The thirst for more, the fearless re-invention, the curiosity to ask questions will continue to be the game-changer in a world that is moving at a pace that is unstoppable. Are you moving or are you jumping?
Note: All writings are my own. AI is my editing partner and social media producer. It was also my image-generating partner today.