Winning in the age of AI

A good friend came to me asking for advice on what to do next with his business. He had seen a lot about the new things AI can do for you, to the point that it made him start questioning the fundamentals of his business.

Insecurity starts popping into your head, and there’s a weird feeling rushing through your body. Breathing becomes irrelevant, blood pressure increases, and suddenly your hands start sweating. It’s like being back in high school, seconds before asking your crush on a date.

Working on a business for multiple years gives you the experience to build confidence. You can clearly articulate what you do for others and how that’s valuable for them, so you can charge for it. It’s simple, or at least it was before AI.

Let’s say you own a warehouse and work in logistics. Watching a robot start doing manual labor better and cheaper than you is going to make you think, What would I do now?

A seasoned truck driver will look at autonomous vehicles cruising the road and think, They don’t get tired, don’t need to stop, and they charge much less. Trucks don’t need me anymore. What would I do now?

A video editor will look at AI tools and see that they do the work much faster and cheaper. They don’t get red eyes after looking at the screen for 12 hours, and they don’t get tired of making changes to the same clip dozens of times. If this tool is so much better at video editing, what would I do now?

Every occupation is put into question. Blue-collar work is replaced by robots, and white-collar work is replaced by AI. So, what’s in it for the rest of us?

Humans have long thrived because of our inner drive for competition. We want to be the best in our group, to be better, faster, stronger. This desire to compete fuels our fire to do something, to get out of bed each morning, to take risks, to ask your crush out on a date. For many, this might be a fundamental sense of purpose, and yet it’s now threatened by our very own creation.

We want to win, and that’s great. We need to keep this fire going, to have a reason to wake up each morning and do something meaningful.

I thought of something I’d heard before:

“What determines if you win in anything isn’t how good you are. It’s how good you are relative to your competition.”

That’s what I said to my friend who asked for advice.

When you start comparing yourself to the best there is, you’ll always lose. You’ll feel bad, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not like when you lose, but you know you can get better, try again, and win. This is more like game over without even playing the game.

Is there an incredible robot driving a truck autonomously somewhere? Great, good for likes on social media, but that doesn’t mean it’s coming after you right now. A new AI algorithm is better at something than you? Fine. Find out what you can do to be better than yourself, not better than the AI. You can’t compete with it, but you sure can cooperate.

“Relative to your competition” is the key concept. As long as you can play with those in your local category, keep doing it. You might be stressing about something you’ll never even see. It’s the anxiety of what might come, rather than confidence in what already is.

My good friend promised to go on an information diet. Too much information is only going to cause unnecessary anxiety. Keep your context local, and remember—you win by being better than your competition. Find out who you’re really competing with and align your expectations accordingly.