Declare an AI Recess

“Recess is over.”

This was the three-word response an AI expert panelist gave to the question “Can you give us a brief summary of your recent keynote on the state of AI?”

This expert made the case that last year was the year that AI came of age, almost as a child in school, and this year is the year for the grown ups to take over and start doing serious work. He made this case at a recent global summit, and he re-made it on this panel.

The next panelist wholeheartedly agreed. He’s a competent AI builder with scores (if not hundreds!) of AI patents to his name. Time to get serious. “It’s gonna be hard work.” Etc etc.

When the moderator got to me, I couldn’t help but appreciate the recess analogy (I’m a sucker for a good turn of phrase!), yet I have reached a very different conclusion:

“I would respectfully submit that, despite what my esteemed panelists say about recess being over, I actually believe that the real problem is that for most organizations, recess hasn’t even begun. Folks who’ve never even gotten a chance to play are now being asked to ‘Find Serious Use Cases.’”

As longtime readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of play. Our imaginations are stimulated by unexpected inputs — by surprises — and play is one of the few arenas of human endeavor where surprise is welcomed and expected.

Knowing this, you’ll appreciate what happened next. I turned to the audience of 500+ senior executives of Fortune 500 companies, “Let me ask you a question: has your company declared recess yet? Mike Knoop, one of the founders of Zapier, gave the entire company an entire week off from normal responsibilities so that they could explore GenAI. Please raise your hand if your company has given folks a day to explore, let alone a week.”

Not a single hand went up.

It’s no wonder folks draw a blank when charged to discover ways for “the organization” to leverage GenAI! They’ve never really seriously played with it themselves!

My humble suggestion is that you — whether you’re a leader, manager, individual contributor, or board member — spend at least 10 hours working with one of the three current frontier models (not a free model). Actual hands on keyboard. If you need to give that time an official, professional sounding designation, call it a “Next Generation Think Week” and point to folks like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, who have all famously employed the tactic.

You must earn the right to act serious, and this right is only earned by thoroughly indulging yourself on the playground.

If you think that sounds radical, good. I’ve done my job. Get to work. Stay in touch.

If you don’t — if you think such advice is too “basic” — then please listen to what AI expert and Wharton professor Ethan Mollick said on Beyond the Prompt the other day, and then forward this blog post to your boss, and your boss’s boss:

“I talk to CEOs and high-level executives all the time, and none of them are using AI themselves.

They've all delegated to a committee that will be reporting back to them in the next three months, which will then start a process of looking for an RFP to hire a consultant who will then do an initial analysis.

And by the way, the consultants don't know anything.

Nobody knows anything.

I talk to all the AI companies; there is no instruction manual out there. There is no secret.

Everybody who's telling you they know how is making it up…"

Personal GenAI fluency is the bedrock of imagining new AI-powered initiatives. It is not something you can afford to delegate to a committee.

And if you open an LLM like Claude, or GPT4, or Gemini 1.5, and don’t know where to get started, please don’t write a poem or a limerick. Just drop me a line. Along with some very clever builders and entrepreneurs, I’ve developed scores of drills I’d be happy to share with you.

(No expert panelists were harmed in the development of this blog post — we all thoroughly enjoyed what turned into a well-rounded, balanced discussion of the true state of GenAI in organizations today.)

Related: Allow Folks to Play
Related: Seek Surprises
Related: Borrow Liberally
Related: Beyond the Prompt

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