689: How to Use AI to Think Better, with José Antonio Bowen

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
AI will change how we work, but it’s also gonna change how we think. In this episode, where to begin working with AI and why those who use it will shape what’s next. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 689.Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:24]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations, A conversation that we’ve all been having a lot more of in the recent past is conversations about AI. How we’re gonna use AI? What does it mean for the future of work? What does it mean for each of us and how we lead? Today’s guest has a quote from Marie Curie at the start of his book who says, “nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less.”

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:06]:
I’m so glad today to welcome an expert at AI and how we think about AI and creativity that will help us to do a better job of utilizing it well in our work. I’m so pleased to introduce José Antonio Bowen. He has won teaching awards at Stanford and Georgetown and is past president of Goucher College. He has written over a hundred scholarly articles and has appeared as a musician with Stan Getz, Bobby McFerrin, and others. He is the author of multiple books in higher education and is a senior fellow for the American Association of Colleges and Universities. He is the author with C. Edward Watson of Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. José, what a pleasure to have you on.

José Antonio Bowen [00:01:49]:
Oh, Dave. The pleasure is mine. I’m so glad to be here.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:51]:
Oh, I have known of your work for many years through Bonni. I’ve been following a bit of your scholarship and so much here that we’ll be able to really, I think, help people think about how we think about this topic of AI. And you and I have been very, very much embedded in the higher education world, both of us, for many years. And over half of our listening audience has graduate degrees. So so are all everyone who’s been listening to. And one of the quotes that really captured my attention in the book, the book is, of course, aimed at faculty in higher education. You write, “if students are collaborating with AI to produce better work, they may be onto something. What we call cheating, businesses see as innovation.”

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:42]:
This whole conversation about AI, people using AI in higher education, it’s requiring a big mindset shift in higher education, isn’t it?

José Antonio Bowen [00:02:50]:
Well, AI is gonna require a mind shift for everyone because it does in some ways redefine cheating. But this isn’t the first time this has happened. Right? We’ve had this with books. We’ve had this with calculators, with dictionaries, right? Those are somebody else’s intellectual work. The calculator made us rethink, well, what math do people have to do? So we still need accountants, but accountants don’t have to be as good at adding up long series of numbers or doing long division as they used to. Maps and GPS are another example. And what’s interesting about that is that a map actually makes you smarter. Right? If I show you a map and allow you to see the world in a different way, and then I take the map away, you’re still smarter.

José Antonio Bowen [00:03:35]:
You still understand, oh, I can navigate by going this way. GPS, of course, doesn’t work that way. Right? Once you have GPS, if I take it away, it’s like now I’m just lost because GPS wasn’t teaching me how to get around. And so we don’t yet know what kind of cognitive artifact AI is going to be, but it clearly is going to change human thinking, and we’re gonna be working with it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:58]:
And there’s so many changes that will be coming through. The summit already are, and there’s also a lot of opportunity too. And I love the example you play out in the book of thinking of a professor meeting with a student during office hours and thinking about how that interaction may be enhanced and actually support empathy better by using the technology. I’m wondering if you could play that out on what that looks like.

José Antonio Bowen [00:04:28]:
So one of the odd things we’ve discovered about AI is that it can improve relationships and improve empathy. In fact, one researcher says it’s like Grammarly for empathy. And that was a person doing research on call centers. Right? And so if you think about it, so you’re on a headset, you’re in a call center, and the AI is listening to the conversation, and then it flashes across the street screen. No. No. No. You’re giving the wrong advice, or you need a supervisor for this, or, oh, stop talking.

José Antonio Bowen [00:04:55]:
The customer’s in distress, or try this. Right? And so, yeah, it’s a little creepy because the AI is listening to this, but the AI is a better listener than most people, right, because the AI is not listening to respond. It’s just listening. And so it turns out that customers are happy. Employees are happy. And an interesting finding, not a surprising one, is that the novice has helped the most. Right? Because I don’t really know what to do with this call person or this how do I and so AI is really helpful there. To the person who’s at 20 years with a headset, it’s like, yeah.

José Antonio Bowen [00:05:28]:
I know what to do.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:29]:
Yeah.

José Antonio Bowen [00:05:30]:
But but we find that in cases like, you know, having the vet tell you your pet has died, cases that require empathy, AI assisted communication still seems to be able to improve relationships. So I do think that that not just call centers, but well, like the doctor. That’s the other example. Right? When I go to the doctor now, you know, we used to go and the doctor comes in with the laptop and the Hweely thing and starts typing. And it’s like, hello, eye contact. I don’t usually get that. Right? Or maybe the tech is doing the typing. But now with with with medical programs that do the insurance notes, which is mostly what they were typing, and my doctor says says, I didn’t get a degree in insurance notes.

José Antonio Bowen [00:06:11]:
I have a degree in medicine. So AI is actually better at I’m at figuring out what the insurance codes are. And so I actually get more eye contact with my doctor than I used to because AI is doing this tedious back end work. And I think that there are lots of opportunities for AI to actually help us understand other people better and to give us a chance to focus more on relationships.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:35]:
As you were saying that I was thinking, like, what an opportunity if we can leverage the technology, AI or otherwise, to do the things that are the more rote, the monotonous things so that we can free up our time to actually do a better job of being present. And I I was thinking about the example you were citing. I I have for years kept detailed notes with any time I work with someone, and I write that down. And as a practice, I’ll go and review them before conversations and read through it. But wouldn’t it be better? I’ve already done the work. Right? Wouldn’t it be better if I could have something in real time that was, like, looking at those and as the conversation was happening in real time to actually suggest things that I’ve already recorded, already part of my system. And and to use that technology, like, what an opportunity.

José Antonio Bowen [00:07:27]:
Well, and it turns out that, right, because AI is, you know, a large language model, it’s really good at stories and narrative and at decoding large amounts of feedback. Right? So let’s say you’ve got a huge file of customer feedback, audio or text because you can turn the audio into text. Or I’m or I’m trying to roll out a new product, and I wanna see, well, how would this play in a different community? What are our users actually doing? And so often, we have right. We don’t have numerical data. We have qualitative narrative data. So AI is really good at summarizing that, just like it’s good at summarizing meetings. And again, the new AIs actually do a better job of understanding the emotions, which is really creepy and weird. Right? That it’s one thing to say, okay, here were the action items, and here were the 4 things that were discussed.

José Antonio Bowen [00:08:17]:
But it’s like, oh, and Bob interrupted a lot. And Bob only interrupts women. And Sheila was distressed during the meeting because Bob right? We can now get other kinds of data that could help us with relationships. And so there’s a weird paradox here because on the one hand, AI is clearly gonna be used for bots, or it’s gonna be used in call centers. But I think it’s most important use for most of us is to not just to think about, well, what could I automate? But how can I use it to improve products, improve services, improve relationships precisely as you say by having it do those tedious tasks?

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:53]:
I know everyone’s at a little different place on what they’ve done with AI. Some people are really into it using it in their work every single day. I know we have people listening who have heard of Chat GPT, maybe played around with it a little bit, just personally, but haven’t really done much with it. And I think the invitation for all of us is regardless of our personal feelings about the technology where we think it’s going, like, there’s a real opportunity here to just learn and to think about how could we utilize this technology to help us to be to think differently, be a bit more creative. And and one of the other distinctions that you make in the book is we’re thinking a lot about AI. At least I know I am. Like, okay. What can AI do for me? What can it say? What’s the creativity in the response and the output that we get from it? But you invite us to think about the creativity is actually in the prompt.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:52]:
It’s what we put into the system. It’s what we give it. That seems like an important distinction.

José Antonio Bowen [00:09:58]:
Yeah. And and prompting is weird. Right? Changing a word can really change with a response. And so I do invite people. I have a website, joseboehen.com, and I have a well, you can link in the notes about I have a list of prompts because I think for a lot of people, they tried an early AI. And by the way, if you’ve only used the free AI, you haven’t used the better paid ones. You’re still using a modem. You don’t really understand what it can do.

José Antonio Bowen [00:10:24]:
But you also have to try giving it more interesting things to do, right? If you ask, you know, Einstein to write you a 300 word essay on Hamlet, you’re gonna get mediocre. That’s not his thing. And so you’ve gotta use the AI in more interesting ways. And so I’ve tried to develop a series of prompts that will allow people to say, oh, you know, this works. So your point about creativity is a really, really good one because people think, well, you know, AI is just, you know, a stochastic pair. It’s just gonna give probabilities. It’s gonna be generic. It’s true.

José Antonio Bowen [00:10:56]:
It will give you generic if you don’t specify what you want. So if you ask it to write an essay or a press release, it will give you generic. But if you say, I want a press release for the CEO in the style of the company, here are some examples. You’ll be amazed at how quickly AI mimics this learned the style. AI is a great mimic, but AI is also a great tool for creativity. It is gonna make all humans more creative. And this is, again, sort of counterintuitive. And there are two reasons for this.

José Antonio Bowen [00:11:31]:
The first is that creativity is really about quantity. Right? We say that quality comes from quantity. That we often have a meeting and let’s do some brainstorming and we come up with 5 or 6 or 10 ideas. And then we stop and we start making variations on those ideas. And what you really need, right, according to one Stanford study, is 2,000 ideas for one successful product. Right? You need a lot more ideas than you think you do. Quantity matters. But the other thing is that we often do brainstorming in groups.

José Antonio Bowen [00:12:00]:
And humans are social creatures, so we’re socially inhibited. I say, oh, I don’t wanna offend Bob and tell him his idea is terrible or that you shouldn’t be wearing that sweater. Right? So this is a good thing that humans are inhibited this way, but it’s a bad thing for creativity. We often say dare you state the obvious. You should say what’s obvious because it’s not obvious to other people. But that’s hard to do because we’re afraid of other people saying, no, that’s really a dumb idea. There’s a quote in the book from a NASA scientist who says, working with AI is like collaborating with an alien, which is kind of interesting. Right? So the way to use AI is to say, okay, I need 50 ideas.

José Antonio Bowen [00:12:40]:
I need a 100 ideas. Right? Try this. You know, I came back from Trader Joe’s one day and said, so using the frequent flyer, give me 500 new ideas for products in the Trader Joe’s style, and then write descriptions in the style of the frequent flyer. And I got 500 right immediately. Now I don’t need all 500, but then I can iterate. I could say, oh, well, I like number 12. Oh, no.

José Antonio Bowen [00:13:03]:
Give me that less tofu. Give me more of this. And and in fact, I was doing this once with an early version of Claude. And I started I said more imaginative. And I got things like, well, unicorn, dragon, mints. And it’s like, okay. Stop with the imaginary. Right? And there’s that process of figuring out what can I do? How do I move it to be more oh, that was too much.

José Antonio Bowen [00:13:24]:
I don’t want that. And so you can really only learn to do that with practice. But I guarantee everybody listening that AI will surprise you. It can probably do something that you didn’t know it could do And it will probably also give you a mundane answer to something that you thought, well, that’ll be easy. But that’s an example of how this is an unusual technology. Right? That’s the opposite of how most technology works. Right? A calculator does really well at the mundane stuff. Right? But it’s not gonna blow your mind at giving you creative ideas.

José Antonio Bowen [00:13:56]:
And AI is sort of the opposite. Right? It doesn’t give you the same answer every time. So it’s actually not very good at some of the mundane stuff. But it’s really good when I’m stuck, and I need to think differently. I don’t understand this client. I don’t understand this problem. Give me more ideas to do other kinds of things. AI works really well when you give it something more interesting to do.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:21]:
You know, as you were saying that, I mean, two examples came up for me just in my own work. I’ve been doing writing of weekly journal entries, and oftentimes, I’ll draft something. And I’ll think of 1 or 2 or 3 things that just come up for me and my own experience and working with clients that are, like, helpful for folks, hopefully. And then I’ll I’ll then go to AI and say, hey. Here’s the situation I’m writing about. Here’s what I’ve already thought of. What am I missing? And it’s interesting what it comes back with, and sometimes it’ll come back with 5 or 10 things. And 8 or 9 of them are, like, really obvious things I already thought of are not helpful for the situation.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:59]:
But there’s always 1 or 2 that get me thinking, huh, I hadn’t thought about that. Or sometimes there’s a super obvious one, like, to your point of, like, saying the obvious thing. Right? I’m like, oh, well, of course, I should include something like that. And then once that idea is in my head, then I can iterate on it, then I can go back and do more writing. And it’s a new way of thinking. It’s like having it’s like having that that brainstorming group in, you know, in your back pocket all the time. And then the other thing I was thinking of just this week, one of our members had shared with us one of our academy cohorts that she’s working with a difficult person, and she’s actually been so smartly writing down over the last 6, 12 months of, like, all the things that she’s noticed of the difficult situations and what’s prompted them. And she said to us, like, I wish I knew what she cared about.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:51]:
And we said, well, what if you took that list and and took out all the personal information, but put it into AI and said, what themes are you seeing that I’m missing? And and it’s just one of those things, like, to get you looking at something differently and to try something new. Because if you can try something new, then that opens up the creative energies that we normally would never think to do.

José Antonio Bowen [00:16:14]:
Well, in fact, the hardest part about getting AI into your workflow is figuring out where to put it, which is why Microsoft strategy seems to be to try to embed it into specific tools and remind you, hey, it looks like you’re writing a recommendation letter. Would you like me to help? Because, right, we forget. Oh, I could ask AI about that. But those are a couple of really good things AI can do. So AI is really good at role playing. Right? So I’m gonna ask my boss for a raise. I’m dealing with a difficult employee. Play the role of this person.

José Antonio Bowen [00:16:46]:
And then again, the more data you upload, the better. Again, you can if I well, here’s the last couple of years of performance reviews. Here’s an irritated email. Help me understand how to communicate better with this person. So the thing I suggest is that think about where in your workflow you could insert AI. Because it’s it’s not always at the beginning. It’s not always at the end. So AI is good at drafting.

José Antonio Bowen [00:17:10]:
I need a first draft. I need to brainstorm. I need ideas. I need an outline. But AI is also good at editing. It’s good at, well, how is this gonna land with this audience? Suppose I change it for a different audience. Right? For teachers, I say, which part of my instructions might be unclear to the novice student? Well, how about for customers? Right? Which part of this website is going to confuse customers? Right? What’s not clear about what to do if I wanna order this product? Right? What’s unclear about how this plan, this monthly plan works? Right? Or for a specific group, right, people forget that AI is really, really good at, okay, how is Oklahoma different than Texan? Or how are Oklahomans different? Or how Or how are Oklahomans different? Or how about a a a specific ethnic group? Or I wanted I’m trying to market to Latino customers in Arkansas. Are there some local references that I should add? How was how is this copy not going to work well? So AI is good at brainstorming.

José Antonio Bowen [00:18:07]:
It’s also good at helping you understand assumptions. Right? One of my prompts is I wanna gain a richer understanding of this problem. Respond as a as a trusting and honest potential customer to help me deepen my knowledge about how this group actually uses my product or this service. And then you can either have a dialogue or just analyze data. What in the user data does this look like? A stress test a business plan. Right? Here’s my business plan for the next 3 years, the next 6 months. What could go wrong? Right? Scenarios.

José Antonio Bowen [00:18:41]:
AI is really good at scenarios. So So ask me what I should do and then tell me what the consequences of that might be for 3 months. We have this really interesting study that AI is a better financial analyst. It was asked to predict, right, quarterly earnings based upon the financial data going back 60 years. And what’s interesting is that the AI was better than the junior interns. Again, we see this all the time. It’s better than legal junior lawyers, junior doctors, not better than experts. There’s right? So we all need to be experts.

José Antonio Bowen [00:19:14]:
But with the financial analysis, what’s interesting is that it didn’t have the bias. It was better in part because when I said, how is Tesla gonna do next month, It didn’t say, oh, Elon. Right? Didn’t it didn’t have an opinion. It doesn’t have an emotional response to Elon Musk. And so that for most humans, that interferes with our response. And so in a weird way, AI does have bias, but it’s easier to fix than a human bias. Right? I can ask an AI, what are all of the things that I could have got wrong about this? Right? Look at my work for the last 6 months and give me contradictory evidence. Right? That’s really hard for humans.

José Antonio Bowen [00:19:55]:
We all have confirmation bias. But an AI can say, well, here are the things that the other political party would say about your work. Here are the things that these kinds of custom right? It’s harder to get that feedback in a neutral way. And so so, again, these are weird things that AI can do, but, you know, for people to try, what else could AI do for me? Cost estimations is another thing. There’s a tool I like called Goblin Tools, Goblin.Tools. So I have a project, and I wanna break it down. Right? What are the steps? How long do you think each of these steps How long do you think this project will take? Right? Humans are notoriously bad at that.

José Antonio Bowen [00:20:34]:
We always underestimate. So it’s a way to get another opinion, often a neutral one.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:41]:
Yeah. Indeed. And, there’s there’s 2 things you mentioned there that I was like, I wanted to zero in and even a bit more. And one of them is more of like a big picture meta thing, which is I think for a lot of us and I’ll I’ll throw myself in this category too of, like, someone who’s mindful of technology, but certainly not an expert in AI, certainly not, like, at the forefront of doing research or anything like that. There’s a tendency to think like, oh, the people who will benefit the most, use AI the most are the people who are the experts in the technology space. Right? And you wrote to me that most of the AI progress for companies is coming from non tech folks and from individual ideas on how to make a specific task more efficient. Tell me about that.

José Antonio Bowen [00:21:31]:
Yeah. So there’s a great new report from McKinsey that I think will continue to be true, which is that most of AI use at work and most of the benefit is coming from nontechnical workers. 88% of it is nontechnical people. Right? Clearly in HR, right, help me write a better job description. And in fact, I want the job description to sound more exciting about our company. Right? So the job description isn’t going to change the things that this person is not going to do, but make it sound more inviting. Right? Make it sound more inviting to women to apply or to this group to apply or those those sorts of things. Certainly, there are tedious tasks that that can be automated, But it’s hard to know.

José Antonio Bowen [00:22:14]:
Right? This is not an IT problem. This is not something your IT department is going to fix or figure out what to do. Right? Moderna gave access to everybody and found that it gave them access to a good tool and found that 25% of their employees were using it, almost daily to do really, really different things. Different people are gonna use it differently. So the culture that you wanna create is try stuff and then share what you’ve learned. Right? So I manage a store, and I have to do the schedule for the employees. And so AI was really useful. Well, great.

José Antonio Bowen [00:22:55]:
If you’ve got, you know, 100 or 1000 of stores, you can now have that manager share their tool with everybody else. Right? But that’s the kind of thing that a manager at a store is gonna come up with, probably not someone who’s sitting in the c suite, you know, who’s a CIO. So so I think you want to to let people experiment because what we’re finding is that, right, better prompts give better answers and that people think, oh, I wonder if it could do this. And then they discover a way to do that. And so there’s a looseness here that I think many large organizations are not used to. They’re used to, well, 8, you know, we have to roll this out for everybody and explain how it works. And the truth is nobody’s really an expert, and it changes all the time. So I think the better strategy is letting individuals experiment, and that seems to be where companies are getting the most benefit.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:46]:
For someone who has maybe downloaded the Chat GPT app or maybe poked around with Claude a bit and used it for some just kind of, like, fun personal things, but hasn’t really gotten into it seriously in the workplace yet. What do you find is really helpful when you’re doing so many so much work now for corporations and helping people think about utilizing AI? When you see people start and actually get down a path where they’re starting to really integrate this well and starting to explore how this works, what is it that works for people as a starting point?

José Antonio Bowen [00:24:21]:
Well, the first thing is to recognize that right there are there are at least 3 frontier models, really, really smart AIs. And so Claude, ChatGPT, both of which currently are free, but they won’t be for long. And then Gemini is the 3rd. And so you should certainly start by using the very best tool you can. There are also lots and lots of other APIs and other kinds of tools that talk to those for you and and have some kind of specialized knowledge. So a tool like Consensus, for example, doesn’t hallucinate because it only looks at published scholarship and and produces, right, here is real science, real evidence. And so, you know, go to consensus and ask, do brain games work? You know, how much sleep whatever. Ask it a question.

José Antonio Bowen [00:25:06]:
It will tell you, well, there there are 12 papers or 40 papers. And this is the consensus of of what scientists have actually said. And so you you get really good information. So there are lots and lots of tools. They’re always changing. But I would start by going to Claude or ChatGPT and and copy and paste some of that prompts from the website. Try just some some longer prompts. Right? Good prompts tend to be longer.

José Antonio Bowen [00:25:32]:
Ethan Mollick has all who I know you’ve had on the show also has written lots of great, you know, 2, 3 page prompts. Yeah. That’s work. So that’s why you want to use other people’s tools to get a sense of, oh, I don’t have to design a whole video game. I can just ask an AI to do it. I I can get it to do a simulation. I can get it to analyze this data. I could upload 2,000,000 words and get it to tell me what are the themes, what things happen over and over again, what are the mistakes, what did I forget.

José Antonio Bowen [00:26:03]:
So so recognizing the kinds of things it can do first. The other thing is that I do think that companies are making a mistake by being so worried about data. And I do understand why there’s a need. Right? There’s a need to have your data in the cloud. For people to learn, they don’t need to use company data, which is why, right, most people who are using AI at work are using it on their phones or on another device because it’s been blocked, right, or there’s only access to limited numbers of things. Those are the people who are gonna learn how to use it and then come back with, well, if we had access to corporate data, here is what I could do. And that would be a good thing. So it will be it is worth your security, right? There is a risk of, you know, it’s not no risk. On the other hand, right, AI doesn’t know anything.

José Antonio Bowen [00:26:50]:
It’s not storing your data. It doesn’t learn by saying, oh, I can find the answer like Google does. Here is where that answer is. So so again, that’s a weird thing about it. And so you were gonna have to have different conversations about security and data and IT with this. But I do think that the best way to start is to, again, go to my website or go to, you know, open a couple of the the really best models and try some interesting prompts.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:18]:
Yeah. And then you will figure out stuff really quickly. Right? Like, it’ll do something useful for you. You’re like, oh, interesting or it won’t. And you’ll say, oh, okay. Well, that didn’t work, but what else might I try? And as you start experimenting with it, I mean, it’s been really interesting to just in my own work, like, experimenting with different things that have been helpful, things that have not. And what always happens then is it gives me a new idea for then, oh, I could use it for this. And as we start using it, like, this I love that you use the word alien.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:52]:
It is this alien thing that none of us are used to using. We’re all gonna learn about it. Inevitably, we’re all gonna be wrong about stuff in how the technology is gonna be used. But just by getting into it and starting to, experiment with it, inevitably, we’re gonna figure out stuff. And then we’re gonna be the kind of person, the kind of team, the kind of organization that is ready to utilize it, has the mindset for engaging with AI because clearly that’s the way things are going and will be more more part of the work that we all do.

José Antonio Bowen [00:28:26]:
It is. And I’ll but there’s there’s I’ll make one correction to that, though. Is this not gonna be quick? Right? That the part of the problem is that people will use it once or twice. They’ll try a prompt. Oh, that wasn’t a very good answer. And then they’ll give up. So it turns out that prompting is weird and that changing the prompt a little bit, right? If you say, well, I want 2 different ideas- 2 ideas for how to do this, but you leave out the word different, you get a different response. Right? If you offer it Taylor Swift tickets or say, you know, you have to do this or the president will die, I mean, that doesn’t always work.

José Antonio Bowen [00:28:57]:
But it sometimes does, right? If you want better math, there’s a study that shows that if start your answer with captain’s log start 2024, that that improves the AI response. Well, that’s just plain old strange. Right? We have and we really don’t know why that’s the case. So my advice is that you need to spend a little bit longer on this than you think you do. You need to iterate. Right? If you don’t get the first if you don’t get the answer that you think you should get, then try to reframe your prompt. Think of AI as a naive intern. In fact, the best way to think about AI is as if I gave you a 1000000 naive interns.

José Antonio Bowen [00:29:37]:
Right? On the 1st day they show up at your office, it’s like, I don’t know how to use these. I don’t know. I don’t have instructions. I don’t you know, because right, your instructions for somebody who’s naive have to be more explicit. Right? They don’t know, well, you said to clean the pots and pans. How do I do that? You didn’t say use soap. It’s like, well, okay. So I need to have really specific instructions the first time.

José Antonio Bowen [00:29:58]:
But after you’ve done it once, then the second time, I don’t need that. So initially, you’re not gonna get much use out of a 1000000 naive interns. But after 6 months, when you’ve got them trained, when you’ve figured out how to use them, when they know you and how you write and what your tasks are, then this is an enormous benefit to your business and your efficiency. But it is gonna take longer than you think. And so often we say, you know, this is just gonna take too long. And it might. But again, if you think of it as these are here are a 1000000 free interns. What could you have them do if you trained them? And so when you write a prompt, you probably have to put in more things.

José Antonio Bowen [00:30:38]:
For example, say follow each step even if you don’t think you need to. Right? And adding that little phrase, do this one step at a time. If this isn’t true, then start over. Right? Create 5 ideas that will entice people to buy my product. But if they’ve already been tried, eliminate them and start over. Or if you can’t find a real reference for this, then skip it. Right? And so and then start you have to give it really specific process instructions. I want you to do a, then b, then skip c, then look at the data.

José Antonio Bowen [00:31:12]:
And if the data isn’t right so that level of detail isn’t going to be quick. And the understanding of how do I talk to AI, right, it does it does work better when you treat it like a human. It’s not sentient. It’s not a human. But when you think of it as somebody who’s really naive who needs specific instructions, you get much, much better responses. And it will take you several tries. So don’t give up if the first three prompts give you generic answers. You probably ask for generic stuff.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:43]:
I’m so glad you made that point, the importance of consistency and keep going after you start trying to write. And that’s actually a great lead into my final question, which is, what have you changed your mind on? You and Edward have been in the middle of this work and research, and you’re also on the practical side teaching, consulting to a whole bunch of the Fortune 500s and helping them think about how to utilize AI and prompts. And as you’ve gotten this work out in the world, as people have gotten into the book, as you’ve reflected on it, what if anything Dave you changed your mind on in the recent past?

José Antonio Bowen [00:32:19]:
So I’ve become a daily flip flopper about a couple of thing. And so the the the first is that, right, you should not be pro or con for AI. And I thought, oh, well, this is gonna change everything. This is gonna be fantastic. And then the next day, it’s like, oh, no. This is gonna be a disaster. That’s not gonna work at all. And what about the ethics and environmental costs and students won’t do the work? And so I’ve come to the point where you have to have an open mind.

José Antonio Bowen [00:32:46]:
Right? The AI is clearly going to change some things for the better, some things for the worse, right? The internet was the same, right? The internet has made our lives all a lot easier and all a lot worse, right? Social media has been a great way to connect with high school friends and it’s also tripled the teenage suicide rate for girls. And, right, we didn’t know that 25 years ago. And so there are gonna be some good and some bad things that are going to happen. You won’t be able to control most of them. But I would suggest that when you hear an idea that AI can do this, right, my first response is, oh, yeah. That’ll be great. Oh, no. It won’t.

José Antonio Bowen [00:33:25]:
And so I’ve tried to take a position of, like so AI as a manager is is 1. Right? So a because, right, most manager right? Managers are about relationships. I like I think relationships are the most important thing a leaders leader does. On the other hand, right, I can only talk to one person at a time in a certain kind of way and an AI manager could provide encouragement to millions of people at once that’s personalized. And maybe that’s a bit… right. So I’ve gone back and forth about saying, oh, hey, I should not be the manager too. Hey, I could be a great manager too. You know, I just have to say I don’t know.

José Antonio Bowen [00:33:58]:
And so I think for a lot of these things, as change happens quickly, we’re going to have to say that could work. Right? So the real danger is that we shut ourselves off by saying, oh, that’s that would be bad when, in fact, we just might not be able to think about how it could be good. And so I keep going back and forth, and I think that’s probably the way we should be approaching this is that it’s gonna be good, and it’s gonna be bad, and it’s probably gonna change on a daily basis.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:24]:
José Antonio Bowen is coauthor of Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. José, thank you so much for your work.

José Antonio Bowen [00:34:33]:
Thanks for having me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:40]:
If this conversation got you thinking today, a few related episodes I’d recommend to you. One of them is episode 564. Make your reading more meaningful. Sönke Ahrens was my guest on that episode. We talked about how to take better notes and think about your reading and how you think about ideas. And I think that conversation is so critical in the context of all the things we’re hearing now with AI and the more recent research because having the technology come alongside us is so helpful and so useful. And if we don’t have a foundation to begin from, then the technology isn’t as helpful for us. Having a foundation of our own thinking of how we bring in ideas, how we think about notes, how we synthesize, Technology then helps us to do so much more with that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:29]:
I think episode 564 is a great place to begin on that when thinking about reading and any information you’re taking in. Also helpful on those core principles, episode 674, the principles for using AI at work. Ethan Mollick was my guest on that episode. Wharton professor, probably the leading voice and researcher right now on AI. We looked at 4 key principles that he’s teaching and how to approach AI, especially in the workplace. It’s a great compliment to this conversation with José and, a good starting point for thinking about how to utilize AI from the principal standpoint in addition to many of the tactical things that we talked about today. And then finally, I’d recommend one of the audio courses on the coaching for leaders.com website. A while back, I aired an audio course on how to enhance your credibility.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:18]:
Now that is a course about how to bring in ideas, how to think about ideas, and then the credibility pieces, how and when and if you share those ideas with others and what formats you utilize for that. And speaking of the technology versus the principles, a lot of that conversation is around the principles of how to think about that and how to do it. The technology is going to continue to improve, but our strategy, our principles are foundational to how we think about this. How to enhance your credibility is one of those free audio courses, and you can find it at coachingforleaders.com. It will, require you to set up a free membership to access that audio course. It is one of the key benefits inside of free membership. If you go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership. As soon as you do, you’re gonna get access to all of the free audio courses.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:10]:
There’s about a dozen of them in there that are series of courses with multiple lessons. You can track your learning from me on many key topics that I think are critical for leaders that I have aired over the years. It will help you to have a good starting point for what’s next, and it is one of the many items inside of your free membership. If you haven’t set that up yet, go over to coachingforleaders.com. Set up your free membership, and you’ll be off and running in just a few moments. And if you’re looking for more, I’d encourage you to discover Coaching for Leaders Plus. You know, a lot of podcasts make money, by doing advertising and sponsorships and being able to support their work that way. And and that’s all good.

Dave Stachowiak [00:39:12]:
I just have always thought that rather than supporting advertisers or sponsors, the best thing that I can do in my work is be able to support results for leaders. And that’s why our platform is almost entirely supported by members and why all of our work on our revenue side of our business is serving members in the best possible way. And that’s one of the reasons that Coaching for Leaders Plus exists to support you in getting better at your skill set so that you can approach the workplace each day with practical things that’ll help you to move forward. Whether it’s through my weekly journal entries or our monthly expert chat recordings or the topic guides, there’s a whole suite of resources inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus to allow you to do that. Just go over to coaching for leaders dot plus to find out more, and thank you to all of you who continue to support my work by allowing me to support you. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest.

Dave Stachowiak [00:39:01]:
Next week, I’m glad to welcome Mitch Warner to the show. He’s from the Arbinger Institute and is joining me to show us how to shift our behaviors to improve our results. Join me for that conversation with Mitch, and I’ll see you back on Monday.