Have you had enough? Have you seen enough articles, posts, blogs, and podcasts discussing AI, including more than a dozen from me (here, and more elsewhere)?
That’s a trick question. If your answer is yes – and you haven’t taken specific action – then your answer should still be no. Truth is, just about everybody who should be acutely aware of AI, is. The problem is that very few people have taken action to make AI an immediate new tool in their professional and career toolbox.
Learning AI: The Fierce Urgency of Now.
Lately, in my role as career coach and job market observer, I’ve asked two questions to everyone with whom I speak in a professional capacity:
1. Are you aware of how big a change AI really is?
2. Are you doing something about it for your career?
I’m sure you know where this is going. Both responses are near unanimous, but going in the right direction for question one (88%) and the wrong direction for number two (15%). That’s the equivalent of knowing there’s a category 4 hurricane about to make landfall and not evacuating to higher ground.
Critical Career Decision
This is just about the most disastrous mistake you can make, from this career coach’s vantage point. Not knowing what’s coming is one thing, but knowing and doing nothing is self-defeating from the very start.
Yet it is, to a degree, understandable in an abstract sense, as AI is still, to many people, this still mysterious concept with no shape, no form, no physical presence. So, if we can’t visualize or define a problem (or challenge), we tend to deny or ignore it.
Well here – in blunt terms – is what’s wrong with that. While you and 85% of your closest friends are doing nothing about it, one out of seven is. While you’re standing still, they’re moving ahead.
Crossing the Chasm
This brings to mind the famous “innovation-adoption” model, also called the “diffusion of innovations” theory first brought forth by Everett Rogers in 1962 and made wildly popular by Geoffrey Moore in his landmark book Crossing the Chasm (1991, revised 1999 and 2014).
Here, Moore shows us that, although a marketing concept and a way to understand product life cycles, we also see how this views our behavior in our careers.
Picture the standard bell-shaped curve, with three standard deviations on each side of the statistical norm. In the case of how we respond to change and new technologies, the farthest left – 2.5% of the population – are the “innovators,” the ones who created or immediately accepted the innovation. Next, the second standard deviation, is what’s known as the “early adopters” – 13.5%. Together, they comprise 16% of the population, and match up almost perfectly with the ongoing findings of my informal survey. Then come the “early majority” at 34%, the “late majority” – also at 34%, and finally the “laggards,” at 16%.
Early Adopters
Regarding AI, we are in the early adopter stage, and, in my opinion, at the relatively early stage of it. Therefore, given the inevitability of AI and the certainty that it will not only change the world, but change it in more dramatic ways than any other innovation in history, it would be a good idea to get with it as soon as possible. Hint: NOW!
I’ve lived through some of the most impactful changes in history – civilization changers like the rise to prominence of the automobile, the polio vaccine, the PC, space travel, the internet, the world wide web, social media, mobile phones, mRNA vaccines – that I recognize what AI is: the biggest and most sweeping change we humans have ever experienced. Period.
And here we are, talking about it. It all comes down to this. Opportunity knocks once, and when it does, it doesn’t wait around very long for your answer. So, while we’re talking AI, it’s time to do something about it – and those numbers – both Rogers’ and mine – bear me out. Considering AI’s nature, pace, and scope, I offer the following corollary: Every step taken now, in this early stage, will be the equivalent of ten steps taken for those who wait. And for those of us who are headed for the “laggard” heap, or even the “late majority,” the uncomfortable truth is that we are creating our own obsolescence.
Learn AI Skills. Become A Sklled AI User
The goal for almost all of us is not to become a “techie” producer of AI; it’s to become a skilled user of AI. Bug difference, both in nature and in likelihood.
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