The Choices in Using AI: Thinking "with" us or "for" us - think for yourself.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked equal measures of enthusiasm and apprehension. Among the fears is a concern that over-reliance on AI will lead people to stop thinking for themselves, allowing machines to replace human judgment, leading to a "dumbing down" and a "vanilla-ization" of ideas. While this fear is not unfounded, it misses a crucial point: how one uses AI is a choice.

And let's be clear what we're talking about here - using GenAI in helping sellers is a little different to using AI in autonomous vehicles. Here one can flip the argument around - no matter how you slice it, most auto accidents are the result of human errors...enough said?

With great power comes great responsibility

AI is a powerful tool, but like any tool, its impact depends entirely on how we wield it. There is indeed the risk of misusing AI as a substitute for human thought—leaning on it to provide not just answers and information but decisions, abdicating our responsibility. AI's most transformative potential, however, lies in its ability to enhance human thinking, not replace it.

AI can help you:

• Research Faster: Scouring to provide insights that would take a human days or weeks to compile.

  
  

• Summarize Effectively: Condensing vast information into digestible insights that make complex topics easier to understand.

  
  

• Assemble Knowledge: Drawing connections across disparate pieces of information to present a more comprehensive view of an issue. Joining the dots, so to speak.

  
  

• Enable you to: stop second guessing yourself. Wondering about stuff you haven't though of.

  
  

A great example goes back to the sales preparation and meetings that are the scourge of the "sales week." Using AI in sales gives you the situational fluency you'll need to succeed in those meetings.

Give A.I. a job description

By leveraging AI to handle specific tasks (like those above), we can focus on interpretation, judgment, and decision-making - higher order thinking! Instead of spending hours gathering data, we can use AI to collect and organize the information, allowing us to make better, faster, more definite decisions.

This brings us back to the central point: using AI effectively is about making choices. Will we let AI do the thinking for us, or will we use it as an amplifier of our own capabilities? It’s a matter of mindset and intention.

I don't like Mondays

The start of the workweek exaggerates all this. The Sunday Scaries and Monday trepidation set in. For many sales teams, the pressure is compounded by the ritual of Monday morning sales meetings, where the "bosses" expect a clear picture of progress and plans. Here is where AI can help.

What "the management" people really want to know is "what have you done and what are you going to do?" It's a review - preview. Next week is the same script. In sales things don't necessarily change on a weekly basis, so if nothing much happened - tell them. If you intend to do "nothing" much on a particular deal this week, tell them that also, and tell them why! The importance of "nothing happening" is whether it's deliberate or not!

You can be using AI to help you present a set of considered statuses and actions for each situation. The beauty of this approach is that while the "bosses" may debate the strategy or plan you propose, they cannot argue that you lack one.

Finally, you can stop second guessing yourself. Your sales AI has presented you with some alternatives - you can decide on which one to go with - but you can be confident you've probably seen them all. This is not just due to your choice to use AI, but more importantly your choice in how to use AI.