I write about artificial intelligence (AI) frequently. My company publishes content about AI, and we produce conferences about AI for distributors. I’ve considered changing the spelling of my name from I-A-N to A-I-N. Information about AI has become such a pervasive part of my life that sometimes I think I’m going I-N-S-A-I-N. 

Trying to keep up with what’s new in AI is like trying to follow current political events but without the nastiness. So, given the choice between the two, I’ll choose to follow AI. However, the real reason you should keep up is this:

AI isn’t only a new technology; it’s a new form of technology.

Videotelephony as a comparison

OK, OK, we’ve all been reminded by experts that AI has been around since the ‘50s. However, for the next several decades, AI was mostly a bunch of ideas and rudimentary technologies that didn’t affect your life and work unless you were a scientist working on AI. 

As a comparison, videotelephony was first postulated in the late 19th century, including the 1879 depiction by George du Maurier (Figure 1) in “Punch’s Almanack,” but it was 120 years before it came into widespread use. Behind the scenes, many scientists and inventors worked on the underlying technologies, but most people didn’t know or care until applications such as Skype, Zoom and Teams made these capabilities available in their daily work. 

My business partner and I were looking for office space when we started our company in 2020. Then COVID-19 hit, so we launched as a virtual company. Thanks to Teams and Zoom, we learned we don’t need an office to conduct business. Video conferencing has been around for a long time, but it only recently evolved to the point where it empowered new organizational models. 

AI changes the game across the distribution business model

The fact that AI has been around since the 1950s is irrelevant; it’s only been since wildly dramatic increases in computing power, dramatically cheaper storage costs and the advent of superfast networks that it’s matured to the point that it’s changing the world. 

The difference between the videotelephony and AI stories is that the former is one small branch of technology, while AI affects all technologies. Within distribution, every part of the business model is being enhanced or even transformed by incorporating AI into core processes and technologies:

The best comparison I can come up with in my lifetime is when personal technology was introduced into offices. One day, I worked with a typewriter, a phone, filing cabinets, a fax machine, a calendar book, a notebook, a calculator and a stack of yellow Interoffice envelopes to distribute messages internally. 

The next day, I had a PC and everything began to change. The calendar became electronic; faxes, letters and the once-ubiquitous InterOffice envelope transformed into email; Microsoft Word and Excel replaced the notebook and calculator; and the filing cabinets pixelized into folders on my computer. 

Of course, these began to be digitized into devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (e.g., the PalmPilot) and then integrated into smartphones. The only reason we still need computers is because of the form factor — larger displays and keyboards make it easier for humans to interface with the digital world. 

The office tools of today look nothing like those of 1995, and if you didn’t learn how to use them, you quickly fell hopelessly behind. 

Limiting the discussion to distribution, no part of your business won’t undergo a fundamental transformation. AI is different from all previous technologies because it’s the first one that learns and improves independently, without human intervention. That means the pace of technological improvement and the breadth of the impact will be greater than any preceding technology. 

For example, turning around complex quotes often took days or weeks. Today, many distributors can turn them around in minutes. AI-enabled inventory forecasting can provide gains in service levels and inventory turns simultaneously that were only fantasies in the past. Delivery routing, which is actually wildly complex, can be done with new levels of efficiency, taking into account real-time information on traffic patterns. 

No part of your business cannot be improved by AI. However, the possibilities constantly expand due to the rapid development of new forms of AI. Most of us hadn’t heard of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT two years ago; now smart companies use them to drive rapid improvements in quality and productivity. And you know, new classes of tools with similar impacts to LLMs are coming soon. 

The bottom line is that keeping up with AI is very difficult. However, failing to do so would be like ignoring the office automation revolution of the 1990s — only much bigger. How far behind the curve can you get before your failure to keep up has real negative effects on your competitiveness?

Ignore AI at your peril

Another real risk of ignoring AI is that it can sneak up on you and take your job. Don’t be fooled by what you read on LinkedIn because some of it is insipid. You may recall this meme a few years ago:

Netflix did not kill Blockbuster. Ridiculous late fees did. 

Uber did not kill the taxi business. Limited taxis and with fare controls did. 

Apple did not kill the music industry. Forcing people to buy full-length albums did. 

Amazon didn’t kill the retail industry. Poor customer service and experience did.

Airbnb isn’t killing the hotel industry.Limited availability and pricing options are.

Technology by itself is not the disruptor. Not being customer-centric is the biggest threat to any business.

This is among the dumbest statements ever written about business innovation. Ignoring for a moment that most of these businesses or industries weren’t actually “killed,” Blockbuster could have eliminated late fees and been the most customer-centric company in the world and its business model still would have died. Streaming video offers a better assortment and convenience than driving to a store and renting tapes or DVDs. 

I agree that renting a taxi wasn’t usually a good experience (still isn’t), but Uber created millions of new rideshare options conveniently accessible on an app with easy electronic payments. The world’s greatest taxi service can’t compete with that. All this makes as much sense as asserting that cars didn’t kill horse-drawn buggies; road apples did. 

The most recent idiotic meme I see sweeping across LinkedIn is: “AI won’t take your job. Someone using AI will.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Someone using AI will take 10 jobs, or 25, or 100 or eliminate certain jobs entirely. Historically, every new technology has, in the long run, created more jobs than it has eliminated. Maybe that will be the case with AI; no one knows for sure. However, I worry that since AI will inevitably be better than humans at almost everything, it’s possible there won’t be much left for humans to do — and that is completely unlike previous technologies. 

So, you need to keep up with AI to figure out where to invest in your skills so you can continue to make a living in case this new technology takes your current job. Some areas seem safer than others: I think it will be a long time before a robot comes into your house to fix your air conditioner, for example. 

As long as humans do purchasing jobs (not a sure thing), then we’ll need salespeople to interact with them. In any case, you need to keep up with what’s happening with AI unless you’re approaching retirement or you’re independently wealthy. Everyone else, watch out. 

Turn on, tune in, skill up

Counterculture icon Timothy Leary coined the expression, “turn on, tune in, drop out” in 1966. He called personal computers “the LSD of the 1990s” and came up with “turn on, boot up, jack in” to encourage people to join the “cyberdelic” (cyber + psychedelic) culture. 

If you need to make a living, like most of us, I think you should “turn on, tune in and skill up,” meaning you should turn on everything you can find about AI, tune in to great content about it and invest in your skills. You can either work to become an AI expert or you can acquire the skills to do a job unlikely to be displaced by this new technology. A lot of risk is involved in doing neither. 

I sympathize with those suffering from “AI fatigue.” It’s easy to let your eyes glaze over when you come across yet another webinar, podcast, TV show or blog about it. However, it’s also deeply fascinating and I think if you really begin to study it and understand it, you’ll learn to discern the important content vs. the fluff and wrong-headed platitudes not worth your time. 

And if you don’t, you may find yourself with extra, unwanted free time as you frantically try to find new skills to make you employable again. Maybe that’s a few years away for your job; maybe it’s a decade or more. You won’t know until you develop enough knowledge to develop an expert opinion, and that will require a real investment in understanding this unprecedented new technology.