AI Reporting for Duty Robyn Quinn | Douglas | February 28 2025
The current tsunami of AI information can be negative, especially how AI may impact our work or the lack of, the truth is that AI promises to become a workforce reporting to the direction and leadership of capable and intelligent humans.
Where is AI Taking Us?
Cameron Moll – a veteran design professional managing design and technology teams for the past two-plus decades at Meta, Pendo, Buzzsprout, Desquared, and more.
In a recent LinkedIn post summarizing all the AI tools and apps worth exploring, Moll wrapped up with this, “Here’s a disclaimer I’m willing to bet my career on: When the AI dust settles there will remain an evergreen need for taste & style at the hands of a professional, the ability to judge with your gut, methodical work at a slower pace, typographic mastery, and so much more that we do as designers.” That goes for content too – writers should look at AI as a robust tool but original and creative ideas still flow from them. AI might have access to massive sources of existing data – it cannot deliver a brand new idea – humans have that ability and must learn how they can manage the power of AI in ways that compliment that unique strength.
According to Rob Cooper, President PlusROI Marketing, “AI is here to stay. It’s not necessarily for the best and there may be terrifying implications but as individuals we can choose to be proactive in managing AI. In short, get out front of it or get run over by it.” He also believes the biggest misconception around AI is all you need to do is input data, “You need to leverage your own expertise. Think of AI as an extremely smart intern. If you train it well and give clear instructions it can do amazing things for you. Without enough training and guidance, the results will border on disaster.”
Deepali Aurora is a Senior Data Scientist based in Victoria and working on a significant global AI project. Her response to a question around the big picture for AI acknowledged AI’s potential to create a lot of good for our world but there are also challenges better managed earlier than later. She saw AI as “A blessing and a curse”.
The Agentic Workforce
Let me introduce you to the AI Agent. This entity is fully autonomous and unlike bots or assistants limited in their scope by programming, once set up agents can observe, analyze, plan, collaborate (with humans or other agents) and here’s the fun part, self-refine. Very different from AI assistants or bots, the agent works on your behalf to gather information, analyze and make decisions based the environment they work in. Can they be trusted to deliver therapy or understand complex nuances dependent on emotional intelligence?
Heck no. According to Google Cloud “AI agents with planning capabilities can identify the necessary steps, evaluate potential actions, and choose the best course of action based on available information and desired outcomes. This often involves anticipating future states and considering potential obstacles.” Ok, so that’s cool.
Becoming Better
Even though AI and humans are capable of self-refining and learning, there are gaps because AI can only learn what it is provided (in the environment or directly). Guess where new roles will emerge? Writing prompts, creating agent personas, managing teams of agents and more. People need to take the lead and steer AI in the right direction whether design, content or complex operational processes. To prepare for this next stage there is a real opportunity for democratizing knowledge for emerging tech skills – and AI is the top of the skills list. The University of California is offering a free course called Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Ethics, Harvard is offering AI with Python and the one I think humans who want to manage AI will find most helpful, Prompt Engineering with ChatGBT a six module course through Vanderbilt University. Their course description says it all “Start by learning effective prompting and complete the course knowing how to bend ChatGBT to your will.” The Terminator narrative may not be an absolute outcome. Thank goodness.
Where to Start
During the BC Communications Forum panel on AI, moderated by A/ADM Strategic Communications BC Eric Berndt, Rahaf Albalkhi, a responsible AI consultant and founder of SKERP (extreme weather forecasting AI) talked about bias in AI. She noted, “AI systems are intrinsically built on bias, in fact without bias AI systems are useless. We humans run on opinions and context; we operate on a self-bias – so how do we work around it?” She defined responsible AI and ethical AI. In the first you must consider all the implications of AI that directly impact people – responsible AI is practical, process-based and real world. Ethical AI is values based and can be harder to develop policy around but it is a critical component of moving forward. The lack of guidelines and general rules around AI is a concern for many (not everyone worries about AI ethics but let’s stay on topic). While Canada is still figuring things out, the European Union has mandated employers who require their staff use AI must provide them with adequate training. A great starting point to the human/AI evolution.