Don’t Settle for Patterns. You Need to Take the Leaps.

This is part three of a series exploring the intersection of human expertise and AI strategy as discussed on the podcast Chat B2B with Andrew Au.

• Week One: Why we need to fix the volume rule

• Week Two: Crediblity is the new originality

Andrew Au, co-CEO of Intercept asked me a question on his Chat B2B podcast that gets to the heart of how we work in the AI era.

How do you define creativity in an era where anyone can use a model to generate an output?

My answer is the difference between patterns and leaps. Jump to 3:05 to hear this exchange.

AI is the ultimate pattern recognizer. It looks at historical data to give you the most likely answer. It’s a rearview mirror. It provides the probable.

But we creative humans take leaps. We find the creative outliers that the data can’t predict. Most importantly we have the guts and conviction to act on them. While AI can recognize what has worked for the last decade, it can guess, but not see what is possible.

AI gives you the probable. Humans take the leap to what’s possible.

I experienced this first-hand while leading security messaging at Dell. In the pre-AI era, I led a $250,000 global messaging test with ten questions on the survey. Nine of those questions were built by consensus and historical data. That was the pattern work.

I reserved the tenth question for a leap. I put in a question that was not in the data, but I had a conviction about it. That one leap became the basis for Dell’s entire GTM security portfolio messaging.

AI wouldn’t have suggested that question because it wasn’t in the data yet. As a leader your job is to know which is which. If you’re using your best creative talent to refine patterns you’re wasting a very precious resource. You’re also creating work that is predictably mediocre.

Let’s stop asking AI for the answers and use the patterns AI finds to take more leaps. Let’s find the space we need to find the outliers our competitors will miss.

This post draws from a conversation on Chat B2B with Andrew Au. Full episode: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify.