Artificial intelligence promises to disrupt how we work, but also offers huge career upside for professionals who start experimenting now. Workplace futurist Marti Konstant suggests that AI is the new electricity that can supercharge careers.
“I equate it to the internet in the 90s,” she said. “It was brand new, and quickly became essential to how we do our work. Today I don’t know many people who do not use the internet.”
Konstant is author of Activate Your Agile Career: How Responding to Change Will Inspire Your Life’s Work and helps organizations and individuals thrive by adopting an agile mindset at work.
She tells us that it’s no secret that AI is coming on strong. Ark Invest predicts that productivity gains due to AI will generate more than $14 trillion in software sales by 2030. Being conversant in generative AI, the tools that generate text, images and other synthetic data, will be essential to maintaining career relevance in today’s workforce, said Konstant.
“If you are not conversant, you are not relevant,” she said.
Tools like Chat GPT, Claude and Perplexity can do any number of things to help accelerate results at work, including generate ideas, strengthen clunky writing, identify research gaps or outline training modules. Some people use it to plan travel itineraries.
For those who are still hesitant, Konstant reminds us that generative AI is here to serve us, not the other way around. If generative AI is inevitable, how can we become AI literate to maintain relevance?
With all the buzz about jobs that might be lost to AI, Konstant reminds us that “it takes orders from you. You do not take orders from it.” With a comfort level that you are in charge, proceed with your own experiments to determine how AI can help you.
Include your audience in all initial prompts. An audience of bankers, for example, will want a different approach compared to a group of engineering students. Their priorities and knowledge are different. When framing up your prompt, be clear on the audience your are communicating to.
Because we’re in the early days, some tools are known to blatantly make things up, known as hallucinating. It’s been known to say people have authored books they didn’t write and graduated from universities they didn’t attend. Address this by asking for 100% accuracy in your prompt. Still, be sure that you evaluate any output to ensure that the information is accurate. Ask it to revise if necessary.
Continue to prompt and give feedback on the responses to nurture the kind of relationship that can improve the outcomes. This series of prompts and responses is called a chained prompt that provides incremental knowledge.
On Konstant’s Instagram account, she suggests how job hunters might use this methodology:
With an adaptable mindset, professionals can use AI as an on-demand work resource. Marketers can obtain fresh positioning perspectives. Coaches could accelerate behavior change research. The possibilities are vast.
“Generative AI will become a seamless productivity tool,” predicts Konstant. Still, oversight is key in early stages and leaders must incentivize ethical, thoughtful adoption.
“Used strategically, AI can unlock potentials we're just beginning to imagine,” she said. Those who thoughtfully integrate these technologies today will shape the future.
