AI is Great, But Let’s Not Lose Our Sense of What Makes Us Excellent

I was going to write this post about the importance ofcustomer experience in professional services. Over the past few days I hadprepped for this by working with Claude on concepts, outlines and drafts andwas going to reference that chat this morning to finalize the piece. Uponfiring up my browser to got to Claude’s website I got this error:

I immediately fired off an email to our IT team telling themto fix this STAT – Greg needed a post after all! Turns out, it’s a system-wideoutage of Cloudflare that shut down Claude, ChatGPT, and presumably countlessother sites. Another example of the Internet resting on a few key components(see the AWS outage from a few weeks ago).

This snooze by my buddy Claude gave me an opportunity topause and reflect on how much I’ve come to lean on it over the past severalmonths. Sure, I’d been dabbling with it and ChatGPT since they came on thescene a few years ago, but this year I’ve become much more a power userespecially as their capabilities grow. Their sudden unavailability was jarringand disruptive to my workflow. Is that a good thing?

There is no question AI is, and will continue to be, atransformative technology to professional services, business in general, andsociety at large. Collective 54 has been discussing their Era 1, 2, and 3frameworks with Era 3 being fully AI enabled. It has certainly made us moreefficient. We’ve recently developed Claude “skills” that help us writeproposals based on client scoping call transcripts, easily create PowerPointdecks that adhere to our branding guidelines, streamline our editing processesto bring our reports to clients faster and more. We will continue to hone ourAI chops to increase efficiencies and quality of output. But this morning I’mreminded of the importance of the human in the loop.

There is a lot of angst about AI dislodging jobs fromprofessionals to creatives, and while it will certainly have an impact, is theangst overwrought? We humans are becoming good at identifying AI producedcontent. Even as AI generated videos become more realistic, there is still acreative person behind them. Will AI ever get to a point where it createssomething truly new? I am beginning to have my doubts.

As owners of professional services firms, we need to be ableto move quickly and adapt to these new tools that will provide tremendousleverage. But, more importantly, we can’t forget that what makes us human iswhat also makes us excellent at what we do. It’s the creative spark that helpsus see solutions for our clients, it’s the kernel of an idea that pops into ourheads and grows to a new product line. Yes, tools like ChatGPT and Claude canhelp us build on these, but we are the ones at the center of the creation.Let’s not lose sight of what makes us excellent – and every now and then let’sstep away from the machines and flex our own mental muscles.

UPDATE: Just after I finished typing this up, Claude cameback online. I was going to run this through it, but opted not to. The above isunadulterated Mike. For better or worse.