I'm sitting on a Delta flight, 30,000 feet in the sky, when I realize everything I'm doing right now with AI is incredibly wrong.
No, I don't mean I'm contributing to the downfall of society, burning down trees, or destroying communities through AI use and its environmental impact. Those concerns may be valid, but that's not what's on my mind as I'm flying forward at 500 miles an hour through time and space.
The thought that pops into my head is that we keep trying to tap into artificial intelligence, and we wonder why companies are signing up for thousands of licenses for their employees, and, at best, they're rewriting emails and doing the most basic tasks, rather than actually creating real value.
Now, I say this not to be a jerk, but because for the last three years, I've been going into companies from two-person teams to publicly traded Fortune 500 companies, and I keep seeing the same thing over and over and over again.
People are not unlocking the true value of AI.
They're burning themselves out with it.
Wasting dollars
Working harder
They're building a bunch of pilots that don't turn into anything.
Or worse, they are like the guy on Reddit who was giving convincing numbers to the board that were entirely made up by AI hallucinating.
And I think it's not because of the technology. The technology is actually there. It's been there for a long time. I think it's an entirely different idea.
Artificial Intelligence becomes Applied Imagination.
I was sitting at my desk just last week...
and I typed "AI" into a Google document. I realize it's not AI that is the problem. It's not artificial intelligence that's the problem. It's applied imagination, or lack thereof.
And I think the thing about imagination that really has me sparked is that every single one of us, from a young age, is creative and imaginative. But then, as we go through systems and schools, they often seek out one answer for every question. And when we seek out a single answer, it limits the number of possibilities.
- Question asking
- Reading
- Writing
I think what happens in life, especially in work, is that we're trying to rule out the number of different possibilities. And when you think about the very nature of how an LLM works, right, how an AI works, it's looking to predict the next token. So, in doing so, it's going to look at the most probable outcome and spit that out.
The future of work is changing.
- Changing45%
- Human31%
- Already17%
- Weird7%
The most likely answer is rarely the most imaginative one.
Now, the thing with AI is it's read the entire internet. It's read every single book. So, of course, the output will be the standard deviation from the mean or the median of the dataset. That's not a bug. That's a feature. That's how these things were designed.
So, I think what that means for us, whether we're using these technologies, our brains, or hopefully a combination of the two, is that we have to start to create an applied imagination.
Companies are building entire teams around Applied AI
But they're applying the wrong kind of AI.
They're applying the same old mental models for how work works, and they're not reimagining how work actually works.
We're not thinking in systems.
We're not thinking creatively.
We're not thinking imaginatively.
And what I'm positing here is that by injecting more imagination into our work, by rethinking what work is altogether, we can start to reimagine things.
02 / The exercise
Design thinking is the right answer with the wrong name
Simply uttering the phrase "design thinking" in most circles will spark cringe and scoffing. And while it's not as en vogue anymore because, like most things, the business world destroys them. But I go back to my early training in design thinking, and I truly believe it is a key to helping companies uncover the true value promise that AI can deliver. And for the zealots, I'm referring to those using generative artificial intelligence, LLMs.
I remember one of the first exercises I taught in a guest lecture I was giving at Yale. I'd gather a bunch of people together and teach them, or should I say remind them, how to think divergently.
You see, in design thinking, we have two different frames. We have divergent thinking, where everything is expansive, and then convergent thinking, where we bring it to a close and make decisions. Fanning out and fanning in.
So, I've got this group together, and I've separated the class into two groups of people.
Now, the thing you have to understand is that these are all top-tier business people going through a masterclass on creativity and design thinking. They're already accomplished business professionals, ranging in age from their early 20s to their 60s.
I divide the class into two sections and give both groups a prompt.
Stop food from decomposing
And then I wait.
I wait a couple of minutes, and the timer goes off. Everyone in that class starts presenting their ideas to me.
And then I see it.
The group that I gave the refrigerator prompt to gave me a bunch of rectangles. They gave me a bunch of boxes. They added widgets, the internet, and basic things of that sort. It wasn't anything imaginative. It was just a bunch of rehashes of what we already have.
Then I go to the other group, and they have some incredibly different ideas. Some are storing things underground. Some are using different techniques to block out light and maintain temperature. I see all kinds of different, quirky ideas.
And I like that because it reminds me that imagination is truly the thing we need more of in business.
And so, three years ago, when I started my company GPC, we wanted to help people train, adopt, deploy, and maintain AI in their companies.
What we realized is that if we were going to succeed, we had to start by applying imagination and applying AI in an entirely different way. We started by looking at how people do work and reimagining work.
03 / Behavior change
MAYA. A designer's framework for innovation.
I think the problem with most people when they're trying to roll out AI initiatives is that they're jumping in and trying to do something too far out on the fringe. It's too much of a radical change.
And I think if we've seen anything from product design over the years, it's that we have to tap into a principle coined MAYA: "most advanced yet acceptable."
I stole this idea from Raymond Loewy, the famous American designer.
MAYA:
Most advancedyet acceptable
Push people forward without losing them.
Too familiar to too radical
And when you think about it, what that basically means is that we can only push the market so far forward. If we take too big a radical leap from one thing to another, everything is completely different.
And I think that's why, right now, the chat interface is the main way we integrate and talk to AI.
Speaking of MAYA, most advanced yet acceptable. When ChatGPT launched, it brought us a familiar thing and added in a new one. A chat interface that speaks and acts like a human, and the breakthrough, the GPT, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
That was the thing that lived in the background. That was the thing that most people still say they don't understand. How LLMs work.
So, I think what's really powerful, what's really potent, and what we have to think about when we're exploring this idea of applied imagination is that we have to get down to the first principles of what work is and understand how we can bring imagination back into the creative process.
300 people. One multibillion-dollar company. One very simple realization.
What I'm realizing when I teach people how to use AI, and I just got back from teaching 300 people at a multibillion-dollar company, different leaders from all walks of life, is that I would show them things and tell them things, and they would laugh at me.
I would say, "An agent is just a text file. And a skill file is just a set of instructions."
And at first, people were like, "Yeah, this guy's crazy."
But then I would show them. I would teach them. We would do it together.
And now, since leaving that workshop less than a week ago, I'm getting emails from people, text messages, and thank-you notes from people who are actually getting real value from AI.
You see, I think the problem right now with AI is that most people are jumping into vibe-coding a crazy prototype or reimagining their own software. And believe me, those things are awesome. I do those things every single day.
But I think, in some cases, we need to take a step back and say, "Why do we actually do that report? What information do we actually need? And how do we get it without actually having to go and do that at all?"
I think the thing we need to realize with AI is that AI has allowed us to think about all the things we never have to do again.
And we've probably heard the tropes. Nobody wants AI to write their screenplay. We all want AI to do our dishes. That sort of thing.
These are all very true things because I think, as humans, we are creative creatures. Meaning-making and seeking machines.
So, when we strip away a human's ability to be creative, to belong, and to create and be part of a community, that's where we go off the deep end in a way I don't think we can realize yet.
I think we need to stop revolting against AI and yelling at people for AI-written content, saying, "It's not X, it's Y."
I think we need to attack the actual problem.
The problem isn't laziness.
That is merely the symptom sitting on every surface we stare at on our backlit rectangles.
The real problem is a lack of imagination.
And if we reinject imagination into our work and our lives, I believe that AI will be the most fundamentally transformative technology we've ever seen.
So, I'm imagining a visual.
I'm sitting at my desk, and I type the word "AI" into a Google Doc. I'm imagining the A and the I fanning out, animating, and turning into the words "applied imagination" in large, blocky text, surrounded by a bunch of beautiful visuals in colors that represent possibility.
They say that in the next era, we're going to have few-person companies building billion-dollar companies.
I believe that's true, but I don't believe it's because of AI.
I believe it's because we're stripping away bureaucracy. Replacing edema with agency. We're getting back to basics. We're getting back to first principles.
Human nature isn't changing. Technology is.
And how we tap into that technology and help it expand and extend our humanity. That's what the next era looks like.