Mind Readings: Saving Time With Generative AI, Part 1

This week, let's tackle a questionslash uh really good newsletter post that Jesper Anderson published on LinkedIn. Uh and the premise was pretty straightforward. He said, why does it feel like AI is more work rather than less? I thought AI was supposed to save us time, and instead it's consuming all the time. And there's some a bunch of different reasons for this.

When it comes to keeping up with AI itself, meaning the technology and how uh the news is coming out, yeah, that is that is its own challenge. And a big part of that would be a content curation system using mostly non non-AI technology to um to be able to keep up with it. But in general, this is a topic that's come up a bunch of times. AI has the challenge is that people confuse AI and automation. They're not the same thing.

Automation means something that is literally just does things by itself, right? If you automate the the uh chaffing of wheat, right? You you put the the wheat in the bin and then you walk away and it does the thing and it separates the wheat from the chaff. We have automation, we've had automation for decades, if not centuries. To automate something means to take the human out of it.

When you look at how AI functions today, how most people use generative AI tools, they are not taking the human out of it. If anything, the human is front and center in the use of AI today, to the point where the humans are doing all the work, right? So you are probably using tools like Gemini or Chat GPT or Claude or Deep Seek or whatever. And you're spending a lot of time writing things, copying and pasting, uh, selecting information, asking follow up questions. And so it's not really saving you time.

It it might be saving you time in aspects, such as how fast it can create output, but you're still kind of elbows deep in the process. You are still kind of doing the thing. You are the automation in that situation. If you want AI to take up less time, you have to blend AI with automation. And again, they are not the same thing.

There are some automation like tools like chat GPT scheduled tasks that allow ChatGPT to run on a certain time and do something. But for the most part, most people are not automating. They are using AI, but they are they are the automation. So in this series, let's talk through what you would need to do to have AI be automated. The first thing we have to remember is that tools like ChatGPT and things are based on models.

They're an interface based on a model. If you're going to automate, you're not using the interface, right? You're not using the the fancy web interface that has all the fun little features. You are asking for a connector to the AI engine itself. Chat GPT is an interface, which means it's kind of like the car.

And underneath, inside the, you know, inside the car is the the engine. The engineers models like GPT 4.0, GPT 41, GPT 4.5, 01, 03, 04. You name it. They're completely nonsensical product naming conventions. And they're not alone in this.

You have Gemini 2.0, 2.5, 2.5 flash, 2.0 flash. You have Claude Sonnet 3.7 and 3.7 extended thinking and so on and so forth. When you start getting into automation, you stop looking at the convenient web interface and start looking at how do I interface with the engine itself. Because we want the engine to do stuff without us having to manually tweak it. It's kind of like uh the difference between you driving the car and a self-driving car.

In a self-driving car, you kind of sit back and take a nap, and the car does its thing by itself. It is fully automated using artificial intelligence, but that is not part of the engine. That is part of the infrastructure of the car. So exact same thing applies here. So you need to figure out a what system do you have your prompts in that works really well?

Is it Chat GPT? Is it Gemini? Is it Claude? I would strongly encourage you to test out different web interfaces first and figure out which system gets the best results for the prompts that you're using. Because once you know which which system to use, then you can start talking about okay.

Well, now how do we automate it? So that would be the first part. The the first consideration is figuring out what system you use, what system you want to use as the system of record for building these automations. In part two, we'll talk about the automation tools themselves and what your options are. So uh see you uh in the next episode for that.

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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world's leading experts on AI and marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and gender of AI, particularly for uses of AI in marketing, AI and consulting, AI and management consulting, AI and business, AI strategy. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers, an introduction in Primer. Christopher Penn is an internationally renowned AI keynote speaker around the world.

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