A monthly take on what’s new in AI — personal stories, opinions, and inspiration from Drift’s leadership team. This edition is written by Drift’s VP of Global Sales and Partnerships, Lee Zucker.
What’s On My AI-Mind
It’s no longer sexy to simply use AI or GPT tech. Though AI has been behind the scenes of our Netflix recommendations and Google Maps routes for years, in 2023, for the first time ever, it came to the forefront. The democratization of AI means that it’s really not enough to state that your business uses AI or GPT—so do your competitors, partners, and even your neighbors!
In this new era of open access to AI tech, we need to ask ourselves: How are we uniquely harnessing this technology to enable the best experiences for our customers and for ourselves? That’s what will make AI sexy for businesses.
Partnering with AI will propel your personal growth, not stunt it. I’ve learned that I can’t waste time worrying about whether AI will replace me or my team. Instead of panicking and avoiding AI tech, I believe that now is the best time to learn as much as you possibly can about how to incorporate it into your job and into your day-to-day life. By utilizing AI as both an efficiency tool and an inspiration source for things like analyzing back-end analytics to refining marketing campaigns, you can improve your own workflows, accelerate your brainstorms, and energize your boldest and most creative ideas, which will ultimately lead to better solutions, happier customers, and more successful careers.
By adopting AI and leveraging its full potential, my job won’t disappear. If anything, new doors will be opened for me.
In the long term, AI will lead to less frustrating experiences for all. AI and GPT provides one-to-one hyper-individualization for audience engagement, no matter if a customer wants a simple Q&A box, a text-based chatbot, or even a phone conversation with a human-like AI voice. Thanks to AI and GPT, endless day-to-day inefficiencies like waiting on hold, scouring the web for FAQs, or navigating glitchy, convoluted website support pages will become a thing of the past. Not only customers—but really, all of us—will be able to move through our days and our lives faster, easier and more informed than ever. I truly believe that if we power our most visionary solutions with AI, we will see unprecedented advances in our personal lives, our businesses, our economies, and our world.
GPT Made This for Me: Wedding Speeches
GPT is a phenomenal source of inspiration for both my work and personal writing. Recently, I used GPT to write a wedding speech: I gave it prompts based on very specific memories or personality traits of the people that I wanted to call out. Then, I iterated on what it sent back to me to make the text shorter, longer, and funnier. While the final speeches looked pretty different from the original GPT drafts, the technology helped inspire me to write more meaningful and personal speeches. Now that GPT is available to everyone, I think writer’s block will become a thing of the past.
The Single Best Thing I’ve Listened to About AI
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway has a fantastic episode with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI, called The Proliferation of AI & the Next Wave of Technology. In the episode, they do a wonderful job explaining the power of AI and the positive impact it can have while also addressing the risks still associated with it if it is not managed properly.
