AI as Sounding Board

“I think I've kind of been using GPT for working through kind of major life events. So like considering purchasing a house for example, kind of working through that and doing tradeoffs and running scenarios and what to consider, and thinking of it as sort of a, I don't want to say co-pilot but the thing is it's kind of a sounding board that's very knowledgeable about a whole lot of topics. Particularly in a context where it involves major life decisions you don't trust it”

“completely, but you're able to cover a whole lot of ground, cover a whole lot of topics, get a lot of insights and things that you hadn't really considered brought into the conversation.”

“This year, the one-on-ones that I used to conduct with the team members, some were much better than others, but there wasn't a whole lot of consistency or structure to them, and I just felt like overall they could be better as a group. So, I turned that question over to ChatGPT and just asked for some best practice methods there. And it gave some pretty decent ideas. I'll say it gave me the good starts of ideas and then I would hone them myself and then bring it back to ChatGPT for kind of like a final "does this sound like a workable plan" and then say yes or no.”

“The detraction I'll say is it's almost, the word I've used with my wife about it is that it is surprisingly seductive in that I might be overrelying on it suddenly. Have I gone from, because I'd always been a little bit of a kind of a Jared Spool skeptic about, hey, this is just a word association machine, this is like a magic trick, this isn't much substance to it, to now suddenly I do use it a lot more than I think I ever envisioned that I would. And in that ideation space, it's been a lot of help just for me to broaden the approaches that I bring to the work that I've got to do for the rest of my team. So, that's been helpful for me. It's almost kind of like having a small council of different personalities or different backgrounds or different perspectives to kind of push against my default way of doing things.”

“So a lot of them are kind of what I would call purists. They see themselves as, "I work in Figma a lot. I sometimes do some research and that's about it." And so now stakeholder management, influencing without authority, communicating to different levels of audiences, things like that. They all needed that. ChatGPT really did help me with coming up with a 12-month comprehensive training plan that included both paid and free sources. I really went back and forth with it for a while on this one to really kind of hone this into something that was, that thus far has proven to be valuable and also feasible from both a cost and a time perspective. So, I was able to get that done much more quickly and much more comprehensively than I ever would have been able to by myself through just what I'll call old research methods now at this point of me just googling things and talking to people.”