By Bryan Kirschner, Vice President, Strategy at DataStax
Insight, expertise, and know-how. Discernment, comprehension, and adeptness. Acumen, sagacity, and skill. Judgment, shrewdness, and savvy.
These words all capture variations on a theme: Applying knowledge is how people create value.
Two of the most important levers for creating superior value arise from the “insight” domain (coming up with better ideas) and the “know-how” domain (delivering better execution).
Today, for example, anyone who uses their iPhone to place an order for Amazon Key In-Garage Delivery is enjoying the result of organizations and their leaders who aced creating superior value during the last two decades of digital transformation.
I have no doubt that as consumers, we’ll soon enjoy new generative AI (genAI)-driven experiences that move the needle on delightfulness, efficiency, or both.
But if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you, your colleagues, your team, or all three are in the business of coming up with ideas for and figuring out how to deliver valuable genAI-driven experiences.
Making the most of any new technology depends on shifting the mindset of people and retooling processes. (We cover this topic in the white paper: From Productivity Paradox to Abundance Agenda: Jobs, growth, and inclusion with GenAI.)
In this first of a short series of articles, we offer a way to inspire individuals to take a growth mindset toward the opportunity genAI presents.
Augmentation excellence and excellent augmentation
Because this dynamic is just as relevant when acting altruistically as individuals as it is when mobilized at massive scale in pursuit of profit in a Fortune 500 corporation, we’ll use a story that is (literally) close to home: a parent and child.
Google’s “Dear Sydney” 2024 Olympics-themed ad for its Gemini LLM-powered chatbot was controversial. That’s a shame, because its first half sets the stage for a great introduction to the potential of genAI.
Let’s begin with how the ad started and where it rubbed people the wrong way, and then get into a revised ending.
The setup of the ad-as-aired is a father and daughter. The daughter wants to write a fan letter to her favorite athlete: Olympian world-record holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
The pivotal moment of the father’s lead-in is: “She wants to show Sydney some love, and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right.”
Just after that point (at the 33 second mark), he proceeds to tell Gemini to “help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day.”
Critics attacked that bit for reasons we won’t rehash here. Instead, let’s imagine a different version of the ad.
In this one, the father still opens with “She wants to show Sydney some love, and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right.” But then after that, what he says to the AI is:
You are an experienced, patient, caring elementary school English teacher. I am a caring father. My 10-year-old daughter wants to write a fan letter to her favorite athlete. It is very important to my daughter that the letter be “just right.” She wants to fully convey her admiration and how the athlete inspires her.
Think step by step.
First, suggest 3 to 5 tips for helping young people with writing in general.
Second, suggest 3 to 5 tips for making a fan letter heartfelt and engaging.
Finally, suggest 3 to 5 tips for reducing my daughter’s anxiety about getting the letter just right and making this into a fun shared experience between us.
This story demonstrates two broadly applicable principles.
We call the first “augmentation excellence.” That means having the skills to put genAI to good use and caring to put in the effort to use them. Our dad shows some solid prompting skills. And while it’s beyond the scope of this article, the applicable knowledge gained through our hands-on experimentation with genAI was head and shoulders above simple web searches (e.g., “how to help a child with writing”).
The second is what we call “excellent augmentation.” By this we mean a savvy or delightful use of genAI: something that causes a team to say, “we’re so glad we did that,” or a customer to say, “that was amazing.”
In our testing, the prize went to noting that if the daughter would be helped by being able to read other fan letters, a dad with augmentation excellence skills could quickly generate a couple dozen diverse simulated ones. If she sat down to write her own, inspired by passages about which she says, “I really like the way they expressed…” or, “this really reminded me of something I like about Sydney,” that’s excellent augmentation.
Augment your excellence
If you’re committed to being your best self at anything from coaching direct reports, making client presentations, or even doing something fun with your kids, we hope genAI is a bigger part of your plans than before you read this vignette.
You might even be in a position to catalyze or lead an organization-wide genAI journey. For you, we’ll tackle how to adapt processes to scale the use of genAI, foster alignment, and get on a path to organizational excellence above and beyond personal know-how in our next article.
About Bryan Kirschner:
Bryan is Vice President, Strategy at DataStax. For more than 20 years he has helped large organizations build and execute strategy when they are seeking new ways forward and a future materially different from their past. He specializes in removing fear, uncertainty, and doubt from strategic decision-making through empirical data and market sensing.
