672: How Relying on ChatGPT or Claude Destroys Your Career

0:02And when there is no vision, the people perish. We choose to go to the moon. If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast, where strategy partners teach you the tools and techniques to solve mankind's greatest problems.

1:04dot com forward slash overall approach and if you are looking to advance your career and need to update your resume you can get a mckinsey and bcg winning resume template as a free download at www.firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume pdf that's www.firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. I had a coaching call this month. My client could not put his thinking together and he said to me, I wish I had a GPT and he could do this before. I have watched him being able to do this before. People are outsourcing one thing they're getting paid for, their thinking, the thinking that happens before writing.

1:48And there's a bill coming for that. And it's not a subscription. It's actually losing reputation at an important moment. For example, sitting in front of a client, sitting in front of a senior colleague and not being able to do what you used to be able to do. You know what is a great way to stay average right now? Outsourcing your thinking and writing to AI. To charge your PT, to quote, raving about how smart it is and stopping doing the work you used to be able to do yourself. And at some point people cannot do it. And my client and I spent five minutes on what that's already costing people and my client is not an average performer.

2:26He's actually one of the best. And this is what worries me a lot. So here's what Michael and I said about this topic during our recent work. You know, asking ChatGPT or Claude for an answer doesn't make any research. You have to know how to structure the question, how to look for the control. You have to be an expert in the field you are questioning so you can check the outputs. I recently had a coaching call and we were focusing on person's executive presence on communication skills, which is one of our programs, Speak Without Limits. And this was the very first time, but I know it is the beginning of this nightmare, where the client was struggling to put things together and said, I wish I had a CGPT right now.

3:07Oh, that's bad. I knew that this client could do that before AI became a normal thing. And now, because we are outsourcing those summarizing tasks to AI among other tasks, or figuring out how to get to the core of what we are trying to say, people are starting to lose an ability to do it themselves. Well, it's not that they're losing the ability to do it themselves. They're losing the enthusiasm to even try to do it themselves. Yes. Which is an even more dangerous thing. Yes. Because research and solving problems is meant to be fun, right? It is fun. If you're sitting there and you're tackling something and you can bring energy and excitement and realize this is a stop-start process, a lot of failures, that's just normal.

3:49Yes. But people are completely bypassing that process. They kind of feel as if because of the way AI works, answers must be perfect and instantaneous. Yes. And by the way, AI's answers are never instantaneous and correct. And never perfect. It requires a lot of guardrails from specialists to build something that works. And most people are avoiding that process. And as you said, humans never let AI write for you. Yes. Because it's not writing the way you write. It doesn't know the context. It doesn't know the relationship history you have with the person to whom you are talking to. It doesn't know your baggage and reputation of the company.

4:26It's basically writing a summary of what the internet says should be the response. Yes. For the reason they're working with an AI system. Oh, sorry to interrupt. And tell me, what is the formula for being like everybody else? In other words, being average. It's called a Gaussian distribution. Basically, just let Chagipitito write it for you. That's being average. Yes. I was recently working with our internal AI system. I was giving it inspections. And I was telling you, you have a very special role. You play this role, X, Y, Z. And then it asked me, so I am your assistant researcher. And I said, no, you are the assistant to the researcher.

5:03You're not the assistant researcher. Yes. You're not trained in research. Yes. But what your job is to collect data, check data, look for data sets, take the hypotheses we give you, run through everything, test the null, and so on. And remember that AI is not the one who will bear consequences of whatever happens based on its advice. You know, but you raise a very good point. When people say their productivity has surged with AI, that's actually not true. What has changed is their output has changed. But the quality of the output is often actually decreased. Because when AI is producing so much material, you don't have the ability to check everything.

5:43But the definition of productivity is output value divided by input costs. But what people forget is the cost they forget to include is reputational damage when people realize they're using AI and passing it off as their own work. It's one thing to use AI and say, I'm using AI. But it's another thing to say, I'm not using AI, but you are using AI and parsing it off as your own work. Yes. And the second type of reputational damage is the moment when you will be sitting in front of a key client or in front of your boss. It could be, for example, you could be a principal in a consulting company. You still have a boss.

6:21You have a senior partner sitting there and you cannot do what you used to be able to do. It's even worse than that. Because you outsourced it all to AI. It's even worse than that. Imagine in front of a judge and he's reading a report. Yes. And parts of it are made up by AI. And he points out that this never happened and this reference is completely incorrect. Yes. So the reputational damage is quite significant. But even if you don't make errors by using AI, the way AI writes it is very verbose without helping you. Because it's trained on the way humans, largely Americans, communicate. And it apologizes and explains that it's sorry.

6:58It should have listened to you. It owns the problem, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. And it's very obvious when you're using AI. A lot of times I'm working with contractors and developers and so on that we outsource certain work to, and a lot of them are using AI to respond. Yes. And it's very tiring because I'll give you this long, remember, for AI to write, it's basically free. Very verbose. Very verbose. It apologizes a lot. It says it's going to own the problem. A lot of fluff. Nothing gets fixed because they're taking my response, putting it into AI. AI is giving them something back, but there's no actual resolution of the problem.

7:35We should actually have a rule with whoever we work with that you cannot write to us using AI. But they do. We have a rule saying don't use AI to communicate with us because we don't use AI to communicate with you. Because it wastes our time. We don't need to read. It's not even your thoughts. Why are you wasting our time? As we wrap up, today's podcast is sponsored by strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach using well-managed strategy studies as a free download. Go to firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And if you are looking to advance your career and need to update your resume, you can get a McKinsey and BCG winning resume template example as a free download at www.firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF.

8:26Thanks for listening to this episode of the Strategy Skills Podcast. Stay up to date on all of our latest training by signing up for our email updates on firmsconsulting.com. We look forward to helping you develop your strategy, critical thinking, decision-making, and communication skills next time here on the Strategy Skills Podcast.

8:55Thank you.