By Jonathan Sharp
Businesses should use AI with ‘applied intelligence’ and NOT ‘artificial intelligence.’Â
Managers need to educate and train employees to use AI with ‘applied intelligence’ rather than ‘artificial intelligence’ as employees are becoming too dependent on AI to do the work for them rather than working with it. If they don’t they will miss out on competitive advantage.Â
Businesses should educate and train employees to use AI with ‘applied intelligence’ rather than ‘artificial intelligence’ to gain a competitive advantage, encouraging employees to work with AI rather than having it do the work for them. Employees are becoming increasingly dependent on it, often don’t check its accuracy and stop thinking for themselves, churning out the same material as everyone else, which homogenises thinking and reduces originality, resulting in reduced innovation and competitive advantage. By making a simple shift in how employees think and work with AI, they can augment their work by staying curious, asking questions, and challenging it to produce more creative, original content.
Trust Your Brain
Managers are realising that the required training isn’t on the technology or on how to prompt it, but on how to use it to work with you, not for you.
People often implicitly trust AI, accepting its answers and output as infallible, but we must always check the output, as the content often doesn’t exist or is incorrect, known as hallucinations. Employees should be encouraged to use and trust their brains and judgement before turning to AI. The human experience is more valuable than the algorithm because it is based on your own knowledge and experience. Don’t assume that because it sounds intelligent, it is correct. Sometimes, employees don’t understand it, but think if AI produced it, then it must be right. This is not intelligent! If employees use AI without thinking first and without following guidelines and guardrails, your brand’s reputation could be at risk, and your employees could suffer from cognitive decline.
Challenge your Thinking
Managers need to encourage employees to use AI intelligently to challenge and expand their thinking and develop their own output rather than relying on AI. Nothing can replace the human brain, which draws on your own experiences and emotions; your input and judgement are irreplaceable. Use applied intelligence to augment and expand your critical thinking and even accelerate it by diving deeper. Encourage employees to direct AI, not use it as an automatic reflex, before drawing on their own knowledge, experience, and judgement. Don’t trust its output without questioning, challenging, and verifying it.
The Effort is Work
AI answers are instant, so employees think: why sit and struggle, why research a subject, why stop and think, why work out the calculations? But often the best results come from the struggle, and the effort is the work. The more time we spend thinking and putting in the effort, the more we understand and develop new or improved ideas, thoughts, and judgements. If businesses don’t hone and maintain this, their employees will weaken and fail to develop. So, businesses need to ensure security, governance, guidelines, and checks are in place, but they must also be aware of the potential cognitive dependency on AI, which should be discouraged, as it can lead to cognitive atrophy.
Research from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft, which operates Copilot, found people’s problem-solving skills could diminish if they became too reliant on AI. A total of 319 white-collar workers were surveyed who used AI tools for their jobs at least once per week and the study looked at how they applied critical thinking when using them. The research looked at 900 examples of tasks given to AI, ranging from analysing data for new insights to checking whether a piece of work satisfies particular rules. The study revealed that higher confidence in the tool’s ability to perform a task was related to “less critical thinking effort” which will inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving.
Use Applied Intelligence
Shift the mindset from we will use AI to get the task done faster to how are we going to use AI to think differently. Businesses that use the applied intelligence approach will be more successful than those that don’t. Encourage employees to speak to it like a director, teacher or philosopher, presenting the information, asking it questions, and challenging it to produce multiple viewpoints or different scenarios. AI encourages us to get curious and challenge its output and ourselves, like a virtual brainstorm, helping us create work in a more human way that is nuanced, critiqued, and grounded in experience. By using AI to augment your thinking you will end up with more originality and a competitive advantage because it forces you to think ‘out of the box’ and differently.
Top Tips for Using Applied Intelligence (AI)
Businesses should educate and encourage employees to use Generative AI with applied intelligence so it reaps the intended result that is varied, well-rounded, using human intellect, applied intelligence with AI, human experience and judgement.
Implement guidelines, guardrails, and provide education and training on where and when to use AI, what value it adds, and in what context they will use it, rather than giving them free rein to test it out. Managers need to instil that using AI to be more productive is not about increasing the volume of work but ensuring that the work still retains its quality. AI enables us to be more productive and work faster, but you don’t want to compromise the quality of the work. It is essential to retain your brand identity and professionalism, and show you care.
Use AI to help with research, summarisation and challenging its output, but always check your facts. Encourage employees to think beyond the output and use it to spark different ideas and outputs.
Applied Intelligence Checklist
Approach AI like a scientific experiment: identifying the hypothesis, your thoughts, methodology, and proof points. AI enables us to accelerate our intelligence and thinking, not to do it for us. It should pique our curiosity and judgement, challenging the output with our gut instinct to decide what is right or wrong, rather than trusting AI to decide. It is also vital to assess what is correct for the market you operate in and whether it can be applied in the real world or not.
- I need to work this problem out before I ask AI
- Ask AI to come up with the answer to your problem
- Do I understand the answer? If not, ask it in a different way and then check
- Evaluate its answer and ask it something to challenge it, or pick out what it could focus on to expand the answer
- Does it have any evidence or stats to back it up? If so, then you must check that they are correct and not hallucinations
- What has it got wrong?
- What has it missed out?
- What can I add to it now without AI?
- Could I explain this to someone, do I fully understand and believe it?
Clearly, the questions you ask AI will depend on the task, but this checklist gives you an idea that you shouldn’t just input a task into AI and trust that the first output is correct and can be used.
Applied Intelligence
Competitive advantage is no longer just having AI; it’s knowing how to use it, and how to think differently with it, to gain a competitive edge and stand out. Managers should educate and encourage employees to make the shift from having AI to thinking with AI, with the objective of determining the value-add of using it and not just to increase their productivity. Employees shouldn’t offload their thinking and work to AI, as this can lead to cognitive atrophy and unmotivated employees. The focus should be on using AI for applied intelligence by directing it, working with it, and challenging it to accelerate your intelligence, thinking, curiosity, judgment, and experience. Then the outcome will be applied intelligence and not artificial.
