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 of customer experience in professional services. Over the past few days I had prepped for this by working with Claude on concepts, outlines and drafts and was going to reference that chat this morning to finalize the piece. Upon firing up my browser to got to Claude’s website I got this error:

I immediately fired off an email to our IT team telling them to fix this STAT – Greg needed a post after all! Turns out, it’s a system-wide outage of Cloudflare that shut down Claude, ChatGPT, and presumably countless other 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 to pause and reflect on how much I’ve come to lean on it over the past several months. Sure, I’d been dabbling with it and ChatGPT since they came on the scene a few years ago, but this year I’ve become much more a power user especially as their capabilities grow. Their sudden unavailability was jarring and disruptive to my workflow. Is that a good thing?

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

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

As owners of professional services firms, we need to be able to move quickly and adapt to these new tools that will provide tremendous leverage. But, more importantly, we can’t forget that what makes us human is what also makes us excellent at what we do. It’s the creative spark that helps us see solutions for our clients, it’s the kernel of an idea that pops into our heads and grows to a new product line. Yes, tools like ChatGPT and Claude can help 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’s step away from the machines and flex our own mental muscles.

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