I’m not an AI expert, and I don’t pretend to be one. Honestly, I don’t think there are all that many true AI experts out there. The truth is, “AI expert” is a title anyone can claim, and AI certifications, while beneficial, don’t necessarily mean someone knows how to use AI to benefit a business, or themselves.
What I am is curious. That curiosity has pushed me to dive deep into using AI to improve my business, provide better service to my customers, and reduce costs for everyone involved, myself and my customers alike.
Along the way, I’ve identified something important: AI is not coming for everyone’s job. If your job depends on rote memorization to function, well, memorization is a skill, but AI has infinite total recall. If your job is to analyze data based on knowledge, AI is probably going to replace what you do, to some degree, if not entirely.
But people who use their minds and strategize beyond what AI can do can use AI to become the best versions of themselves. Another group is those that are so highly skilled that they can determine when AI has gone off the reservation. AI will assist motivated employees and companies become the best versions of themselves. That’s what I expect to see soon: AI helping people adapt as it takes over parts of their jobs.
Here’s a real example. For a couple of months now, when a support request comes into our service board, an AI agent analyzes it, compares it to previous requests from that user or others in the company, checks our knowledge base articles, both customer-specific and global, and searches the internet for resolutions. Then it prioritizes potential solutions and provides links to previous tickets, knowledge base articles, and support documentation so a technician can validate it. The AI could likely resolve many of these issues on its own. We’re not ready to hand over the reins to that extent, yet. But tier one and tier two support issues will probably be resolved by AI faster, and possibly more accurately, than any human could.
In this process, our technicians see the resolutions AI recommends, but they’re also learning from them. A good technician experiments and learns. A bad technician just parrots what AI says. That difference will show up in customer satisfaction, and it’ll separate the button-pushers from the people who stack on new knowledge with every interaction with AI.
That’s the differentiator. When I say AI is not coming for your job, it’s not coming for the job of the person who learns, adapts, and gets one percent better every day. It’s coming for the people who are status quo, who take the leg up AI gives them and use it to do as little as possible. That gap is going to widen, and surprisingly, AI is going to make it abundantly clear who has value in the marketplace, and who doesn’t.
AI isn’t here to take your job. It’s here to help you become the best version of yourself and do the work AI cannot do effectively: true discernment. AI can deliver what it thinks is true, but it often takes a human to know what is actually true. You’re never going to hand the controls of a nuclear power plant to AI without human oversight. You’re never going to let AI wipe and rebuild your entire network infrastructure without human intervention.
The goal is to become valuable enough that you are that human intervention, someone who learns and adapts from what AI provides to become the best version of yourself. AI gathers the knowledge and puts the pieces together, but you must decide whether a piece belongs to this puzzle, or a completely different one. Even if a piece fits, that doesn’t mean it belongs. That discernment will be the key to success as the AI revolution takes hold.
Brian Largent
Father to five, husband to one, founder, CEO, and all around swell fella (or so I'm told)
