As inspired by a recent newsletter from Ethan Mollick of One Useful Thing, here are 15 types of tasks where artificial intelligence can be useful, given its current capabilities:
- Work that requires quantity – for example, the number of ideas you generate determines the quality of the best idea. You want to generate a lot of ideas in any brainstorming session. Most people stop after generating just a few ideas because they become exhausted but, the AI can provide hundreds that do not meaningfully repeat.
- Work where you are an expert and can assess quickly whether AI is good or bad. This can involve complicated and exacting work, but it relies on your expertise to determine whether the AI is providing valuable outputs.
- Work that involves summarizing large amounts of information, but where the downside of errors is low, and you are not expected to have detailed knowledge of the underlying information. AI is good at summarizing novel-length work, but less successful at fact-checking it.
- Work that is mere translation between frames or perspectives. For example, you have developed a policy but now have to turn it into a dozen different training documents for different audiences in your organization. AI is very good at this sort of translation, increasing or decreasing complexity of documents so that people can understand them.
- Work that will keep you moving forward. Little things often block our way, and a push might be all we need to accomplish it. When writing prior to AI, I might get stuck on a sentence and walk away from writing for an hour, but now I ask AI to “give me 30 distinct ways to end this sentence.”
- Work where you know that AI is better than the “Best Available Human” that you can access, and where the failure modes of AI will not result in worse outcomes if it gets something wrong.
- Work that contains some elements that you can understand but need help with the context or details. Tyler Cowen suggests using the AI as a companion when reading, because it allows you to ask infinite questions.
- Work where you need variance, and where you will select the best answer as an editor or curator. Asking for a variety of solutions – “Give me 15 ways to rewrite this bullet in radically different styles, be creative” – allows you to find ideas that might be interesting.
- Work that research shows that AI is almost certainly helpful in – many kinds of coding, for example.
- Work where you need a first-pass view at what a hostile, friendly or naive recipient might think.
- Work that is entrepreneurial, where you are expected to stretch your expertise widely over many different disciplines, and where the alternative to a “good enough” partner is to not be able to act at all. AI can be a surprisingly competent co-founder, helping to give mentorship while also acting to build the documents, demos, and approaches that are otherwise likely to be outside your experience.
- Work where you need a specific perspective, and where a simulated first pass from that perspective can be helpful, like reactions from fictional personas.
- Work that is mere ritual, long severed from its purpose (like certain standardized reports that no one reads). What, in the words of Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, scatters your attention and makes you less valuable? What work serves no useful purpose? In an ideal world, you would remove the work, but you can at least reduce its hold on you by having AI help. (But make sure this is indeed the case – far too many people automate performance reviews, for example, which are meaningful only when done by a human.)
- Work where you want a second opinion. Give AI access to the data and see if reaches the same conclusion.
- Work that AI can do better than humans, which is likely to be the fastest-growing category.
Authored by
Broc Romanek