🎙️ Weekend Listens: AI, More AI, Community, Motivation Tricks, & Would A TikTok Ban Be 'Un-American'?

Some podcasts that made me take notes this week. Plus those notes.

I’ve been quiet for a bit. Change is a-foot. More on that soon. For now, some weekend listening recommendations.

🐙 Generative intelligence can propel productivity

Chalk this up as a victory for the centaurs (humans + AI).

Here's the paper's abstract:

We study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,179 customer support agents. Access to the tool increases productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 14 percent on average, with the greatest impact on novice and low-skilled workers, and minimal impact on experienced and highly skilled workers. We provide suggestive evidence that the AI model disseminates the potentially tacit knowledge of more able workers and helps newer workers move down the experience curve. In addition, we show that AI assistance improves customer sentiment, reduces requests for managerial intervention, and improves employee retention.

Unlocking knowledge from top performers' heads and turning it into a resource for anyone at the company to use, sounds amazing.

Generative AIs aren’t an extension of how we currently interact with digital, they’re a reimagining. We have to change how we conceptualize activities like “search” and “content.”

When interacting with large language models (LLMs (think ChatGPT)), asking “please give me sources” is no different from asking “give me something that looks like things that have sources.” These models don’t have context or semantic understanding, they have incredibly powerful pattern matching turbocharged by historic levels of compute.

Is a TikTok ban a good idea? How would it even work (at least on a state level)? All good questions. But what about this question:

If the US suddenly starts banning foreign apps on data privacy and security grounds, will other (non-Chinese) countries do the same to American platforms and services?

Plenty of unintended consequences on the table here.

Don't Say Content

What if community wasn’t a strategy, what if a community was part of your business model? What if it was just part of doing business?

Community isn’t something you do at people, it’s something you build with them.

Just because something is old hat to us jaded marketers, doesn’t mean it isn’t new and surprising to other people.

It’s not transactional. The goal is to make people feel or understand that they belong. You belong here, this is for you.

How to motivate yourself or others:

• Focus on outcomes over means

• Keep the goal a little abstract

• But make sure it contains a concrete number(s)

• Early on, focus on how far you’ve come. The closer you get to completing your goal, look forward to what’s remaining

This last point is useful for managers.

For new team members or people new to their roles, reviews and support can focus on how far they’ve come.

For experienced peeps, focus on how close they are to achieving their goals and the gap that remains.

Because incentives matter:

• Too many incentives is demotivating

• A few randomized, surprise incentives is motivating (like slot machines and social feeds)