A decade ago, more or less, my husband and I were dissecting the latest direction to come from one of our various high-up, anonymous leaders: “Be more innovative!”. Delivered with the kind of exasperated tone of a put-upon parent who just wanted their kids to tidy their rooms.
Over a bottle of wine on a Friday night, we viewed the request cynically through the philosophical lens of whether “true original thought” was possible, and that the greatest minds in history were lucky to have more than one true innovation attributed to them (this counts as fun for family Crossick). We debated “innovative to the company” vs “innovative to the industry” vs “innovative to the world”. And we pondered what a reasonable innovation velocity was for an individual or a team. Even if true innovation is rare, ideas are two a penny, and count for nothing without execution. So ideas without delivery is not the goal. And even novel ideas executed well relies on innovation from your users, to change their habits.
Many years later, AI is changing the game. It’s changing the way we work, and likely the way we think too. In many places, it’s taking down the cost of execution, or at least the cost of experimentation. But while AI itself may count as a “true” innovation (I’ll leave that question to the philosophers), it cannot innovate for you. It can only recombine and re-hash pre-existing ideas. Maybe those pre-existing ideas get combined in novel ways if you ask the right questions, and maybe that looks like innovation… but AI can’t innovate for you. Not really. It’s a predictive model, it can only repackage what’s already out there.
What AI can do, is bring in huge “innovative to me/my team/the company” value. The majority of problems we work on look special but often aren't really, and the treatment is often the same... Apply good practices, based on proven industry-level learnings, guide people through applying the changes they needed to make, bed it in… and then move on to the next thing. Apply a few feedback cycles if you're feeling fancy. Done well this can feel revolutionary, but it's not.
Is AI coming after your job? Certainly if your job involves sitting at a computer, following patterns and playbooks, re-hashing ideas into new outputs or even applying “best practice” to knotty problems… I think there’s a risk that AI will be able to do it better, faster and cheaper than you can. Your moat is your ability to innovate. But does anyone truly innovate? And how much innovation can the world handle anyway?