If you are like us, your path to AI adoption has taken a few twists and turns along the way (regardless of whatever stage you find yourself at today). Somewhere along the journey over the past year, I found myself digging to grasp the core challenge this technology presents and why it’s easy for some and difficult for others to embrace. Outside of the initial response of fear, excitement, threat, skepticism, denial, and other fun things we humans like to engage with to stop us from seeing the forest for the trees, I found a current of understanding running much deeper. I believe part of the answer can be found in those who adopted it the fastest; in our case, this hit close to home, as the development / software-engineering industry was one of the first to leverage AI and set it on the seemingly exponential path we see today.
But why? As a formerly active developer myself, what we've maybe always known but never fully stated is that our superpower is not coding, or developing specific software, or having expertise within a given stack, environment, or implementation; instead, it has always been in our ability to use different language to effect an outcome. In a very real sense, AI is a new language, and those who can truly master that and get the most incredible things out of it are those who are primed by the concept of language itself. This is not unique to developers, they just happened to arrive first – it extends to each role in an agency like ours. Rarely will you find anyone that holds a candle to creative experts in the use of language as an art, or strategy, or tool: it's the gift that developers, designers, marketers, and other creators have that no one else can touch without a massive amount of effort and intent.
How do we stay on top of this new technology (or dare I say – entity – whatever it becomes)? It’s probably a history lesson already learned a hundred times over: use your gifts, and learn a new language.
