Top tips for applied intelligence and not artificial
Jonathan Sharp is CEO of Britannic Technologies
Businesses must 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. Generative AI produces content in seconds, and more and more employees use it daily, but many provide no original thought or input into it, and don’t verify its accuracy, and sometimes don’t even understand the content.
Employees are becoming increasingly dependent upon it, not thinking for themselves and churning out the same material as everyone else, which homogenises thinking and reduces diversity and originality. This is a major red flag for business leaders because it reduces innovation and destroys the competitive advantage, but with a simple shift in how employees think and work with AI, they can augment their work by being curious, asking questions, and challenging it to produce more creative and original content.
Trust your judgement
Managers are realising that it’s not the training on the technology or on how to prompt that is required, but rather how to use it to work with you and NOT for you.
People make the mistake of implicitly trusting 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, which is 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, as it is based on your own personal knowledge and experience. Just because it sounds plausible and intelligent doesn’t mean it is, and employees are regularly duped into assuming it is correct. Even if they’ve read it and don’t understand it, they think that 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 in jeopardy, and your employees could suffer from cognitive decline.
Instant output – no effort
Today, we live in a society of instant gratification, with everything on demand and everything delivered now. AI delivers results in seconds; people don’t have to wait, but you still need to verify facts, understand them, and ensure they can be applied in the real world.
Employees who accept the first output generated by AI risk it being incorrect, delivered in the wrong context, or not working in reality. This way of using AI requires no effort or thought, and it will erode critical and basic thinking and more than likely produce sub-standard work that may require extra time and rework because it’s not up to scratch.
The perfect team
Aside from guidelines and guardrails on how and where to use AI, managers need to encourage employees to use AI intelligently to challenge and expand their thinking with it and develop their own output rather than relying on AI.
Remember, nothing can replace your human brain, which draws on your own experiences and emotions, meaning your input and judgement are irreplaceable. By working with AI and challenging it, you can use applied intelligence to augment and expand your critical thinking and even accelerate it by diving in 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.
Nothing can replace your human brain, which draws on your own experiences and emotions, meaning your input and judgement are irreplaceable. By working with AI and challenging it, you can use applied intelligence to augment and expand your critical thinking and even accelerate it by diving in deeper
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 sometimes, the best results come from the struggle, the effort and the thinking time.
The more time we spend thinking and making the effort, the more we understand something 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.
If employees become dependent on AI, the material produced will have the same tone and content as everyone else, homogenising thought and diluting your competitive advantage. Lack of diversity and originality in thought should be a major concern for business leaders because it reduces innovation and erodes competitive advantage.
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 we are going to use AI to think differently. Businesses that do this will be more successful with AI because they use it with applied intelligence; its output will be more valuable, and employees need to be shown how to work with it.
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. Get curious challenging AI and yourself to come with something different and think on a much deeper level.
Much like a virtual brainstorm, using it to create work in a more human way that is nuanced, has been critiqued and is based on 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.
AI has been slated for making us less creative but if we use it with applied intelligence to champion our thinking and challenge it then we will become more inquisitive producing more original material.
Top tips for using Applied Intelligence (AI)
Businesses must 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.
They will need to set guidelines, guardrails, and provide education and training on where and when to use AI, what value does it add and in what context will they 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.
1) I need to work this problem out before I ask AI
2) Ask AI to come up with the answer to your problem
3) Do I understand the answer? If not, ask it in a different way and then check
4) Evaluate its answer and ask it something to challenge it, or pick out what it could focus on to expand the answer
5) Does it have any evidence or stats to back it up? If so, then you must check that they are correct and not hallucinations
6) What has it got wrong?
7) What has it missed out?
8) What can I add to it now without AI?
9) 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 but knowing how to use it, and how to think differently with it to give you the competitive edge and stand out from the competition and not blend into them. Businesses should educate and encourage employees to use AI with applied intelligence and not artificial with the shift being from having AI to thinking with AI. Stressing that the objective is to ascertain what the value-add is from using AI and not just focusing on increasing the volume of work it can get through.
If this change is not implemented, businesses will find it counterproductive, mistakes will be made, and the quality will be absent. Managers need to encourage employees not to offload their thinking and work to AI, which can lead to cognitive atrophy and unmotivated employees. The focus needs to be on using AI for applied intelligence by directing AI and 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.
