Practical AI: Personalizing tools and learning

About five years into my journey learning ballroom dancing, I had this sudden insight. It happened while I was dancing with my teacher at a party. When you get to a certain level, all dance styles are really variations of the same dance. So if you know enough steps and movements, you can transfer a pattern from one style to another. So I did. I added a complex rumba pattern in the middle of a smooth walls to which my baffled teacher stepped away and shouted, you can't do that. And I said, why not? It works. And she started answering and then stopped, and we both left. What does ballroom dancing have to do with AI fluency? Let me explain. At a certain point in your AI fluency journey, you'll have the same type of insight. You'll realize that being fluent in AI has as much to do with how your work changes as it does with your technical skills using AI. True AI fluency happens when you stop thinking about AI as an external thing that is happening to you and your work and start just thinking about the work and how to do it well. That's not an insight you can force to happen or speed run to. It's something that comes to you gradually and then all of a sudden, but it's helped along by how fast our AI tools and capabilities are changing around us. When we took our first steps with ChatGPT, generative AI was mainly a chat experience. As I'm talking to you now, the big conversation in AI is around autonomous, self-replicating and self-activating AI agents. And what's coming just beyond the horizon is a fundamental transformation of the entire software industry from digital products covering broad use cases being built by experts and sold to groups of users, to people using AI to build their own bespoke just-in-time throwaway apps that do what they need when they need it. What's happening and will continue to happen thanks to AI is a radical shift in how we work and what work we do. Our main job as this shift happens is to lift our heads, look to the horizon and see what's coming, and actively take part in building our future with AI. That work starts by putting our humanity first and lifting up our own skills and the skills of the people around us. Here are some things you can do to get started. Keep building your skills and make lifelong learning a daily habit. Push existing tools to do new things and try out new technologies as they come online. Share your knowledge by teaching your skills to your coworkers, peers, friends, family, community and do it online and in person. Take part in the conversation about where, how, and when to use and not use AI. Find ways you can build your own technologies and share those that work. Most importantly, ground everything you do with AI in the knowledge that AI is just technology. Without us, it's just an empty chat window where nothing happens.