3 Questions to Calm Your A.I. Anxiety

If you google “best A.I. tools”, you will get 2,170,000,000 results.

(For my fellow English-major-math-haters who just started counting the commas, that's two BILLION, one hundred and seventy million results.) First, I'm pretty sure I've personally been emailed approximately two billion one hundred and sixty million of them in the last few months, and second, I found that I was definitely going down the rabbit hole of tools, software, and plugins oh my! 

If you've found yourself in the same boat, maybe you also have been suffering from what I am calling A.I.- Yi Yiii anxiety. Let's be honest, the Instagram black scroll hole has NOTHING on the A.I. endless possibilities for the life-work-existence rabbit hole. If “WHERE DO WE EVEN START” conversations have also been plaguing you lately (can we use that word again now?), I'm here in your inbox this morning to offer you the email equivalent of a cool, cucumber-scented towel. 

*Hands it to you here:

The best antidote for you to soothe sweaty A.I. Yi Yiiii moments is for you to pause, breathe, and use your beautiful human strategic brain to

SURFACE YOUR STARTING POINT. 

I recently leveraged this exact strategy in a meeting with one of our agency clients, when a particular VP of Sales/Marketing started listing out all of the potential A.I. tools he wanted to start deploying like, yesterday. The 20+ A.I. integrations he wanted to roll out ASAP started to make even our most enthusiastic programmers shift sweatily in their seats. It was shiny object syndrome on steroids. So we paused, and flipped the script to help him move away from ALL THE THINGS to surfacing a more realistic, efficient, CALM starting point. 

 We asked him these three “surface the starting point” questions:

1. Where does your sales organization already naturally shine the brightest?  (Prospect presentations, client relationship management) 

2. Where does your sales organization tend to continually struggle? (anything “paperwork/tracking”- expense reports, logging calls, pulling reports) 

3. Where is ONE key area that you're looking to improve upon using A.I.? (time management- more time spent interfacing with prospects and clients, less time interfacing with paperwork and reporting)

Just having that ultra-basic dialogue with him allowed him to flip the order of operations from ALL THE TOOLS to let's start with THESE FEW TOOLS. This simple “pause and ponder” really helped us to comb through the sweaty scary monster list of potential A.I. integrations and calmly evaluate whether the proposed integration was a “nice to have someday” tool or a “need to have now” tool. 

If you're an entrepreneur or solo operator, you can perform this same exercise to alleviate your A.I. Yi Yiiii syndrome into more of a sane starting point. Perform an audit of your everyday tasks and responsibilities to determine where you shine the brightest naturally, where you tend to struggle, and then ONE area you'd like to begin improving results using A.I. as a support team member. 

Decide your (not someone else's) ONE starting point. Write it down on a post it and put it on your computer. Reference back to it early and often as your personal A.I. compass the next time (and the time after that, and after that…) that someone sends you yet another mind-blowing possibility for your professional toolbox. 

Intentionality and clarity of purpose are THE KEY to navigating this A.I. revolution with calm clarity. The winners in this digital arms race will be those that embrace proactive decision making, not reactive “we have to because everyone else is” decision making. 

Which team will you be on? 

To your continued success online, offline, all the time!

Erin 

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Erin King is the world’s leading digital persuasion expert, a 2x bestselling author, and Chief Digital Officer at Strikepoint Media. She helps sales and leadership executives become more persuasive communicators using her PUB Method™. SUCCESS Magazine named King one of 2022’s “Top 10 Must-See Motivational Speakers”. She is the author of two bestselling books “Digital Persuasion” and "You're Kind of a Big Deal". Her podcast, “On Your Terms with Erin King” is in the top 1% on iTunes. To learn more about Erin's keynotes, trainings, or workshops please visit ErinKing.com.