The one thing AI can’t give me

Last week I was brainstorming a concept idea for one of our clients together with my team. Kevin planted a seed, a picture popped into my head, I shared it with the team and a concept started taking shape as we bounced off each other. I could feel a sense of acceleration and thrill in my body when Kevin suddenly said, “I just got goose bumps”.

It made me realize that I have been missing something essential recently. Throughout the past year, all of us have started using AI increasingly. We didn’t take it too seriously in the beginning. It was more “let’s see what we can do with it” than a complete overhaul of how we work. Claude and co. are always there for us, no need to schedule a meeting or book a room, so it silently became our first choice. I feed it some information, pose a question and get 10 great angles thrown at me in 4 seconds. I read through them, some of it might stick, but none of them give me goose bumps.

I take AI’s input back to my desk and chip away at it. I hope for a quick and usable result that I can bring to the next meeting. All of this I do in isolation and so do my colleagues. Sometimes when I listen to them, I catch myself thinking this is great, but where does it come from? Like I am missing a piece of information. Now and then we start sentences with “AI said” as if the machine was just another colleague who couldn’t attend the meeting. We all do our tasks with the help of AI now. We come back to the meeting, all of us having shaped something new, but the machine where the input came from is never in the room when we discuss it further.

So yes, I am appreciative of this invisible co-worker that speeds things up and gives us great input, but I also wonder how it affects our human experience. At Angels, a human-centric agency, one of the deciding factors for our work is whether it makes the audience laugh, think or cry. But sometimes even we can forget our principles when adapting to new ways of working. I know for myself that I want to pay more attention to how we experience our work: less prompting in isolation, more goose bumps.