Five questions people ask me about AI
They come up at work, at dinner and in my messages. Here are my honest answers.
Adrian Davies
Will AI take my job?
It will take tasks before it takes jobs. The repetitive, written, rule based parts of work are changing first.
The people I see doing well are not the ones with the cleverest prompts. They looked at their week, found the dull bits and handed those over. Then they spent the time they got back on people.
Is it safe to paste work into a chatbot?
Only if your organisation says it is. Free tools and paid business plans can treat your data very differently. The business plans from the big providers generally do not train on what you type by default, but check what your company has actually signed up to.
My rule is simple. If I would not email it to a stranger, it does not go in.
Which model is best?
The one that fits the job and the budget. I test two or three on the real task, with real examples, and look at the results and the bill side by side. For the safety checks in Solaces, Gemini came out as the sensible fit.
Anyone who tells you there is one winner for everything is usually selling it.
Can I trust what it tells me?
Treat it like a confident new starter. Often right, sometimes wrong, never embarrassed about it. Ask where something came from. Check the numbers, names and dates before they go anywhere important.
Where do I start?
Pick one boring thing you do every week. A report you rewrite, notes you tidy up, emails that all say the same thing. Try it with AI for a month.
It will either earn its place or it will not. Either way, you will know.