6 Blind Men and an Elephant
And why AI is the elephant
A director asked me a question at my briefing to a board yesterday. So what do we need to know about AI to do our jobs? I don’t think I answered it to his satisfaction. But what I’m sharing below might help you to answer it for yourself.
It starts with an elephant illustration I drew more than a decade ago. I dug it out and made it the motif for an app I built with Stephen Tracy recently.
Why?
Remember the six blind men who meet an elephant? One grabs the trunk: “a snake.” One touches the ear: “a fan.” One hugs a leg: “a tree.” All equally certain. All equally wrong.
I suspect that’s how AI feels to many of us right now. We each touched one part of this broad and deep thing. A few prompt tricks. One good demo. One project that went wrong. Some AI development in the news that seems like science fiction. But do we know the whole animal?
Certificates prove you sat through a course. Using an AI tool is, well, just using a tool. Quizzes prove recall. A prompt engineering course teaches you zilch about AI. Just how to type things into a text box. The snake. The fan. The tree. Not the elephant.
Job AQ is an experiment by Stephen and me. A simple (ok, maybe not that simple) behavioural assessment of how you work with AI. Not what you know about it. Scenarios drawn from your own job.
You don’t just get a score out of 100. You see where you stand on 4 dimensions - understand AI, work with AI, evaluate AI, own AI risk. Where your opportunities are, given your job archetype. And the gap between what you believe about yourself and what you actually did. So far, that gap surprises almost everyone.
The video below walks through the whole thing. (Yes, I know I look a little shabby, but it’s been a really long week.)
It’s at jobaq.me. Try it. Then send it to the five other people holding your team’s elephant.
#AICompetency #AIFluency #AI #JobAQ