Don’t obsolete yourself — Kelford Labs Daily

Every day I see more and more service providers and communicators working hard to obsolete themselves.

Specifically, the ones that focus exclusively on employing “best practices” for their industry.

The ones that think the way to credibility is being the best, cheapest, or closest version of the accepted industry standard.

Best practices are actually a perfect evaluation for the progress of AI systems. They give them the ability to “hill climb” toward being the best at any given standard. And everyone likes working towards a goal, even AI labs.

Which means what’s left for us as service providers is what they currently cannot do:

Generalize outside of their training data.

That is, invent new, novel, never-before-seen ideas and applications.

I know this is a controversial point, and many people believe current AI systems constitute “Artificial General Intelligence” and, in fact, do generalize beyond their training.

But if they do, they do so barely. Naively, incompletely.

Leaving us room to maneuver and improve. To climb our own hills.

Toward being more creative. More imaginative. More in touch and in tune with the real people we work with.

When industries become automated, the first thing that happens is the human workers become more like robots. They act more rotely, more consistently, more predictably. So that, eventually, an automated system can slot into their former workflow. Their former role.

So I worry about service providers doing that to themselves. Focusing all their energy on automations, on making their work easier, faster, more standardized and predictable.

Instead, I think the way forward for service providers is focus on the areas of their industry where automation is far off, or forever impossible.

This is why I love getting on Zoom or Google Meet and talking to my clients face-to-face. So I can notice where they pause, hesitate, or avoid looking at the camera. So I can ask things like, “Wait, what just went through your mind?” Or, “Hold on, I see wheels turning: Tell me what’s going on in there.”

My job, as a marketer for communicators, is to figure out the things you aren’t saying to me so we can figure what you should say to your prospects.

And, right now, AI can’t do that. It takes what we tell it as given, as written, as rote and real. And it parrots back to us what we want to believe and what it “thinks” we want to hear.

I tell all my clients, “There’s no amount of money you can pay me to lie to you.”

Whereas an LLM will lie to you for free.

So here’s the truth I can’t avoid: The service providers and communicators who only implement automated best practices are obsoleting themselves.

But the ones who focus on what only they can do because of their unique combination of skills, experience, and interests will be able to stay ahead and stay active.

They’ll become the prototype, the target against which AI systems are evaluated.

Instead of being a checkpoint they’ve already cleared.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

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