The Wisdom Deficit: What AI Can’t Teach Us

AI cannot replace your wisdom

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00:27Bill Gallagher: AI is a bad replacement for wisdom. It's a bad replacement for your wisdom and all the wisdom around you. There's a lot of great things about AI, but it does not replace your wisdom, your human decision making. Hey, listen. I want to talk to you about this now. You're probably excited about AI. You might be nervous about AI. You might be delighted with all the things you could do, and yet at the same time uneasy. I think your gut has something interesting to tell you. And I want to dive into that a little bit now.

00:51Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of this Scaling Up Business podcast. We bring our show to you every week, and we've got something to help you grow and scale your business, other CEOs, authors, gurus, that kind of thing, all with tools and tips. You'll find all of our programs and more at scalingcoach.com or just wherever you're getting this right now. So you can go to scalingcoach.com, or you can go wherever you're getting this show right now and like, subscribe, turn on notifications. We'll bring you a show every week. More than 650 of these wherever you're getting it right now.

01:29Bill Gallagher: So let's get into this. First of all, let me give some credit in both realms. My son, Jack Gallagher, built the underpinnings of what became Midjourney. First of all, did it right on the deck out there. It became versions 2 through 7 of Midjourney. Huge thing. And then he went on to Cursor, and now he's working on one of the core problems as an AI scientist at Claude. So even without my own technical background, which is not insignificant, I've watched all this very, very closely, had detailed rich conversations about the underpinnings of it. And then with my business as a coach and my clients' businesses all over the world, AI is a thing that I'm deeply ingrained in. I've helped upgrade and move our tools. We use AI throughout our practice today in helping companies grow and scale. So I know something. I'm not just an old dude mouthing off about general business.

02:24Bill Gallagher: Also around business, right? I have considerable skill coaching companies, many companies over $100 million, a few companies past $1 billion, and over 1,000 companies over $1 million. I've helped companies grow in addition to being a CEO and growing my own. So just establishing some of my own credibility on the convergence of these two topics, business growth and AI.

AI produces generic business language

02:50Bill Gallagher: So I want to talk to you about what I'm seeing now in our workshops, in our client sessions, that kind of thing. There are some patterns emerging that I think are worth talking about. AI can do a lot of things and you should probably be using it. You and the key people on your team should probably be using it as often as every hour in the day, not like once a quarter or once a week or whatever. But throughout all the things, it's a fundamental tool just like the personal computer, just like the Internet. It's a fundamental thing that will change everything and will keep growing.

03:22Bill Gallagher: I want to talk about what's showing up right now. Right? What I'm noticing now is that if you try to turn over your role, your own judgment, your wisdom, if you try to replace your coaches and advisers with AI because it can seem to do some really great things, you're going to make some big mistakes. And I'm seeing this across the board.

03:42Bill Gallagher: So I've just led this quarter alone, I've led over six strategy workshops and a couple of our very related strategy-plus kinds of Scaling Up workshops where we used AI to figure out the company's strategy, what's important, do competitive analysis, all that kind of stuff. Really, really helpful. And yet, in every case, as I asked people, had interactions with the team of what the things were, what it said for your Brand Promises, for ideal customer profile, for your competitive advantages, like all of these kinds of things, it gave, in many cases, nonsense. In some cases, the things that it produced were like watered down, gray, verbose, like too many words, generic business crap that is not useful and not helpful.

04:36Bill Gallagher: But what it did do in every case was greatly speed the synthesis of ideas, the collection of research, the distillation of surveys, all of that kind of thing it did a really good job. And when pushed further and honed in, it took it a little bit further. And then reading between the lines, we could pull out something really magical. But it wasn't until we added peers, coaching, other, mostly peers and coaching, really, that we started to refine something. So boom, we get a distillation of a lot of input, surveys, competitive analysis, and then we have a draft of what might be Brand Promises. But it wasn't until we applied some critical thinking and some natural language, less generic gray goo that passes for Internet or AI content, that we got something really compelling. So we had to take it and use it as an accelerator. It's a tool. It's not the answer. It's not a replacement. Right?

AI wants to please you, not challenge you

05:42Bill Gallagher: Same thing true in our client sessions. We're using research beforehand, distilling employee surveys and leader surveys. We're doing competitive analysis. We're using it in the session to distill operating practices and all kinds of things like that. But the first pass of it is not final. It needs tweaking. And it's not just like giving it iteration on what it can do because it goes down some weird directions. It doesn't always produce it. It's a combination of AI plus human that's really valuable.

06:12Bill Gallagher: If you ask AI today and you throw a bad business idea at it, it'll give you a thumbs up. AI in general, all of them, the LLMs, are wanting to please you. They're engineered to try to make you happy, to give you the answer you want, and that's not always a good idea. Even if you sometimes set it to do something else, like I have in my profile for Claude, I have it set up to argue with me about things. And that can be also frustrating on the flip side. It's not going to do one or the other. ChatGPT tends to be more agreeable to me. Claude, I've set up to be a little more contrarian. But either way, it's not the final answer. They're just one possible thing. It's just like I wouldn't want to rely on one board member or one advisor to do that.

Distill strategy into short, colorful language

07:08Bill Gallagher: So we're looking out for the things that might be considered garbage, generic, gray, undistinguished, long things. In most of our things, whether it's our one phrase strategy, our differentiating actions, our Brand Promises, we want to distill them down into unique, compelling, real language, not generic business terms. So you know this around things like core values, right? So if you come back with multiple sentences or single word things like integrity, teamwork, communication, value, safety, garbage. Not interesting or compelling enough. Just occurs like background. We want to get really colorful specific language and also very short. So you can go through some iterations, but it is really a little bit of AI with some human stuff that makes a big difference.

08:04Bill Gallagher: So the thing to remember here is you still want a strategic council. You still want a group of people or a couple of individuals that give you great wisdom and feedback on your strategy. You want a coach, you want advisors, you want some peers, not just one of those things. You probably want all of them. I love to have advisors, mentors, peers, coaches.

Keep coaches and advisors in the process

08:32Bill Gallagher: All of them for myself, for my client companies. The other thing is your brain is actually trained on a lot more. AI can grab everything, like all human knowledge, and distill it down and can be pretty profound sometimes. Depending on the model you're using and how you're using it and that kind of thing, you can get some really interesting things there. But it is not the only thing. Your own, like your gut, your stomach, like it can lay out a plan for you that you could look at and you go, I still can't do that. Like it's going to take longer than it thinks I could get it done, right? And then noticing and leaning into the emotional component. What are you afraid of, right? What are you afraid of? A lot of the AIs will mimic the emotional awareness and can respond to things even as a pretty good therapist. But I wouldn't replace it. Like a great augment, a complement for things. So noticing what you're afraid of, leaning into the subtle human communication cues in real time face-to-face conversations that the AI is not going to interpret, right? AI is not going to listen for tone, for the timbre in your voice, for the quiver, or when you get moved by something. So I want to combine it. I'm using AI multiple times a day, every day, in all parts of my work. And I think you should too. And I think all of the people in your companies and teams need to be getting to that place where they're finding ways to be using different AI tools nonstop through their day. But that is not to replace any one of them or the voices. It's to just speed, accelerate the kind of work that they can do with their productivity to get comfortable with it. So look at some of the things you're getting out of your AI tools and ask yourself, does it really matter? It shouldn't be replacing all the stuff. Like it's not going to replace your content generation, but it might greatly speed the content generation. I go and I brainstorm topics with AI, and then I might refine drafts of things. But there is some human thinking at all parts of this. I think that's the key thing is that, look, I want you and everyone to have a lot of that in there and to be using it that frequently. I just don't want you to make the mistake of thinking it's going to replace anyone or anything in getting these kinds of things done. So that's kind of my tip or thing for today. Like how could you be using it more but not letting it replace the good thinking, the wisdom, the humanity involved in creating, like, your very best strategy and the best year yet. Hope you have a great year ahead.

Use AI daily but keep human judgment central

11:15Bill Gallagher: I'm Bill Gallagher. I hope it's been helpful for you. Like, subscribe, do all that kind of stuff, and get it passed along to somebody else. That really helps us. That would be a big favor to us. But I hope it's been useful. Share this with your team, with your friends, and that kind of thing. If you want to know more, if you'd like to join us in one of our workshops, if you'd like to join one of our cohorts or get our free growth assessment, which is AI enhanced, drop us a note. Visit scalingcoach.com. Scalingcoach.com is our website and where you can find it or if you're getting this right now, but the website would be the way you get in touch with us or have us help you out with something else. Thanks again to my friend and mentor, to our producers for getting the show out. Thanks for watching, listening. Keep with us. Keep scaling. Talk to you next time.

12:04Announcer: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.