AI & The Future of Work

Today is a deadline for eligible Amazon Prime customers to claim refunds of up to $51 from an FTC lawsuit. The $2.5 billion settlement resolves allegations that Amazon enrolled some customers in Prime without their clear consent and made subscriptions difficult to cancel. If you're eligible, you can file claims online if you never received an automatic refund. Steve. Well, listen, we talk about AI a lot, and it's certainly changing the way that businesses work. But what will set companies and people apart in the future? Let's find out a little bit more. We're joined by Jonathan Aberman, the CEO of Hopsite, to talk more about the competitive advantages that maybe can't be replaced by AI. It's good to see you. Thanks for coming in today. Hey, thanks a lot for letting me spread the message. You know, we were just sharing the story with Elon Musk was talking about the future and how AI could, you know, in his words, eventually bring everything we ever needed to us. What do you think about that? I think Silicon Valley is telling us a story right now. They're telling us a story of replacement. Their technology will replace people. The reality is it's a self-serving story. The reality is that people value novelty. People create novelty. They consume novelty. And these models have a fundamental flaw. It's a feature, not a bug. They create similarity at scale. Architecturally, that's what they do. It makes them great at giving you knowledge, but not great at creating differentiation for business or people. So let me try to make this as simple as possible for people out there. If I'm hearing you correctly, what you're saying is, is that all these different models that are out there, when we talk about AI as a whole, they're all getting information from the same places and they're all going to spit it back out essentially the same, right? Right. So how do we use it to customize, to differentiate, to make one stand above another as far as our needs or usages? Well, so we started a company, HubSight, here in D.C. to be outside of this echo chamber because what we know from our science is humans create originality. It's measurable. So you start understanding that AI is a tool, like a computer calculator or a wheel, and that what we do is we use it to accelerate, amplify what it is that we do well. And that's the secret to using AI well, and that's the secret that, frankly, we need to publicize through moments like this. So there are a couple of things I think that we're learning as humans by using AI more. One is, is that if we just use it as a replacement for everything else, we're not getting any smarter, are we? We're actually getting dumber. There is a lot of science now that demonstrates that when people use AI as an oracle instead of as an accelerant, it actually causes measurable cognitive decline. We actually see this in the science that we're using at our company, but more generally, peer-reviewed research now shows this. The good news, though, is that you can reverse this cognitive decline by treating AI as your assistant instead of using it as your oracle. It's actually simple. So I'm asking the question will be, what are some of the ways that we can best utilize this for the benefit? But I want to preface it with saying in real talk, especially here in the DC region that we're all very familiar with business-wide, you have so many contractors out there, right? You have so much government work that's being done. You have so many people who are saying, if I'm going to take your contract, I don't want you to just tell me you're using AI. I want to know how you're using it, how you're implementing it, and how that's going to make this more efficient and better for everybody. So how do companies or individuals do that? How do you stand out of the crowd? Well, again, because AI can be measured and because human output can be measured through companies like mine, the place to begin is to put your people first in a position where you say, use AI. Use it badly. What inevitably happens is their ability to create originality declines. The cognitive decline is real. You can see it. You can measure it. And then you sit down with your people and say, listen, the way you use this is to amplify. And then you teach them how to amplify by writing down first what they want to ask, by getting the AI to challenge, not to spit back what they've asked. There are tools you can use, techniques you can use. It's teaching, basically. And once you do that, companies are able to show to the government that their people are generating originality. It's demonstrable. We can, for example, measure content. So somebody can take a piece of content and show the government, listen, there's originality in here. Right. We started this company here in DC. I've been here a long time. Big believer in local tech community. Our government contractors actually are really important to our community. They're high value added, highly intelligent people. This approach allows them to differentiate so that AI can do what it does well and people can do what it does well. Do you think we'll get to a point where because if I'm following the arc that you're going on here, we're going to get back to the human to stand out the human involvement, right? Not just relying on the artificial intelligence, but taking our own human intelligence to prompt to get the most out of it. Do you think we'll get to the point of full circle moment where the AI is kind of secondary at this point? Right. And we're back to the human intelligence driving the platform. 100 percent. It's business school 101. Businesses compete in efficiency, but most businesses compete in differentiation. Government, citizens value good service over commodity service again and again because we consume novelty because we want to feel special. So yes, what will happen over time is that the the bubble will end. Bubbles always end. I was part of the Internet bubble here in the early aughts. Bubbles end. But AI is ubiquitous now and it will become, in my opinion, a tool like computers. I mean, look, you don't hire somebody, say, oh, my God, can you use a computer, right? Use a computer. You use Excel. You create spreadsheets that have insight. It'll end up the same way if we let it, which is why times like this, the opportunity to speak with you right after Elon Musk is so important for our region and for the nation. We need to make sure that people understand that they matter right now and they're not to be replaced. They're to be amplified. Certainly fascinating to see where we go with it. I appreciate you coming in this morning. We'll put the information up to if folks want to reach out to you. There is the website for upside. Thanks very much. It's great chatting with you. Appreciate it. Sure. All right. We'll send it back to you. All right. Thanks a lot.