AI and Accelerated Influence

There will be winners and losers in the race for AI adoption. Make sure you're on the side of the winners.

AI will bring about the biggest shift in our education system in 250 years. And, like every seismic shift, there will be winners and losers. 

You want to be on the side of the winners.

Right now, there are only losers in our schools. Student behaviour is the worst it has ever been. There is mass disengagement. Teenage mental health problems are on the rise. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. And now ChatGPT is writing student essays (and improving grades). Everyone is asking questions, and no one seems to know the answers. 

It’s your job to find some of the answers. If you do, it will propel you above the noise spewed out through social media, blogs and internet articles. 

I’m guessing you’re interested in becoming your school’s go-to AI person. You can see there is potential to accelerate your career, gain influence, and have others rely on your wisdom and insight. You’d be right. Massive shifts create massive spaces, gaps in knowledge that someone has to fill. 

You’re already seeing AI as an Influence Accelerator. 

Even if you don’t want that much spotlight on yourself, you do want to make sure you’re prepared for the shift that is about to happen. Trust me: you don’t want to be caught napping with this one.

AI is not all hype

In terms of AI take up, according to the Gartner hype cycle we’re only just beginning the first upslope, with the innovation trigger being the release of ChatGPT. Gartner wasn’t quite right back in 2020 in terms of the order of things, but there’s no doubt that we’re on the big hype upswing at the moment. 

As of August 2023, Open AI’s ChatGPT has been joined by Google Bard, Anthropic’s Claude, and Inflection’s Pi in the closed space, and by almost a third of a million models on the open source community (291,623 on the Hugging Face model board to be precise, with the oldest almost ten years old). The best known of those are currently Meta’s Llama model, and Stable Diffusion’s XL model - but no doubt by the time you read this there will be more.

The problem with upslopes is that they reach their peak, and then there’s a corresponding downslope (when we fall into the Trough of Disillusionment). While you’re riding the wave there’s a sense of euphoria, where people feel like no wrong could possibly happen, that this time it’s different, and so on. We’re certainly there right now with AI. This shows up in the weirdest of places, such as the supermarket who created a recipe planner bot that suggested mosquito repellent roast potatoes and the recipe for a refreshing chlorine gas drink. 

But AI is not crypto, and anyone who says so is wrong. AI is already useful. To date, crypto and blockchain are ideas, theories that haven’t been stress tested. So the hype with AI is not going to burst in the same way as it did with crypto two years ago. There’s bound to be a tail off but that’s a good thing. You don’t want AI to have too much attention for too long. You just want to be learning about it now and increasing your influence.

The choice is binary

Right now you therefore have a choice, and it’s binary. Either you embrace AI in the right way, seeing what it’s good for and staying well away from what it’s clearly not fit for (Oreo stir fry, anyone?), or you bury your head in the sand and think that, once the hype has died down, we can carry on in our own human way with AI fading into the background. 

As a teacher, school leader or administrator, if you embrace it in the right way you stand to be successful. You will be able to strategise, plan and deliver faster than your peers, create more interesting resources, analyse data better and faster, move away from dry, chalk and talk lessons towards immersive, real world projects, and give a good deal of the ownership of learning to your students. 

If you ignore it, you may well be replaced. 

If you’re a Head, one of your deputies who’s embraced it will be impressing the governors or proprietors more than you. 

If you’re a senior or middle manager, your team won’t see as much need for you as they can do all the data analysis, structuring and pathway mapping themselves. 

If you’re in operations or finance, there will be plenty of AI applications that will do a lot of your job for you, so expect to see the administrative side of schools slim down in the next few years to save cost. 

People will sadly lose their jobs in the coming years. Schools have to reduce cost to remain competitive and to balance the books. Managers are averse to reducing teaching staff cost, but they will begin to reduce operating costs. And that cost might be you. 

But you’re reading this, so that’s a good start. Don’t ignore this advice however. Be smart, learn as much as you can about AI and its application into your line of work, and make sure others know about it. AI knowledge is not to be kept secret. Don’t be ashamed: you will have superpowers others won’t, and can use them to your advantage. 

Make AI boring

This may seem like an odd thing to finish with, but I think AI will be at its most powerful when it’s boring. I want you to see it in this way because, in so doing, you can focus your attention on AI doing the unsexy, tedious and time-consuming stuff so that you can focus your time and attention on the human side of schools: relationships, trust-building, inspiring and being creative. All the ingredients of Accelerated Influence. 

Begin with this approach in mind and you also won’t fall into the trap of thinking that AI will replace you or your colleagues - which, as you can probably guess, will make everyone around you super defensive when you begin to move your school into an AI-amplified future. 

Yes, it will probably replace a few of them, I’m sorry to say. But only those who fail to see the potential of AI to make themselves invaluable. Do you see where I’m coming from? Those like you who give themselves AI superpowers will be fine. As I’ve already said - more than fine. It’s going to hugely separate the wheat from the chaff. I just don’t see there being many passengers ahead. 

That’s not your problem. Don’t go into this trying to convince the laggards. They’ll either wake up and realise they need to adapt what they do, or they’ll fade away. Let them make that choice. You just show them the potential and make it simple for them to embrace. The rest is up to them.