Have you ever played The Wiki Game? It connects two (usually) random Wikipedia pages — think nudibranchs and The Office — and your goal is to get from one to the other by clicking links along the way.

At its core, it’s a game about structure and how everything connects underneath the surface. Which, it turns out, is also a pretty good way to think about Deane Barker.

Spend any time in the world of content management, and you’ll eventually land on his work. Deane has spent three decades helping organizations make sense of how content is modeled, structured, and delivered — the often invisible systems that make the digital workplace actually function.

With AI, a lot of that can start to feel elusive… and that’s exactly why we’re turning to Deane in this issue. — Kim

Pop quiz ↘

One of the great complications of AI is that it’s a tool. It’s a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. It’s less of a “product” so much as it’s a new way of doing things.

As such, sometimes the hardest thing is knowing what to do with it.

We all know that it’s wildly powerful, but lots of people are simply using it as just enhanced search. I was guilty of this myself early on — I’d tell anyone who would listen that ChatGPT was “what I always wanted Google to be.”

This is something that happens with every paradigm shift. Our view of what a new technology can do is limited at first, because we look at it through a historical lens and we don’t know how to apply it in new and interesting ways.

This leads directly to what’s called Amara’s Law.

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

Named for technologist Roy Amara, this speaks to what we’re seeing with AI now: Everyone is waiting for it to affect their daily lives, but for many people, those transformative changes are elusive. It’s basically a “super search engine.”

But as we figure out how to use it — what it’s good at and what it isn’t — and how to apply it to what we do, the long-term effects of it will be staggering.

Consider the internet itself:

I was around for its initial hype (people my age might remember “the information superhighway” — a phrase that was vastly over-used). But not everyone got online, and then the initial bubble finally popped. Around 2000 or 2001, people thought the internet was overhyped and a product of inflated expectations.

Fast forward 25 years, and the world would almost stop working without it. While the short-term forecast was vastly more than it could deliver, the long-term effects have embedded themselves into every part of our life.

Short-term promises are exciting. Long-term benefits are almost boring in their inevitability and how they burrow themselves into the background of what we do.

AI — like the internet — is a paradigm shift, and this is the core thread of technology adoption throughout history.

And here’s the best advice I can give:

For anyone figuring out how to apply AI: Don’t do it alone. Your view of what it can do is limited by your perspective and experience, and lots of people are using it in ways you could never imagine.

Just the other day, a friend gave me a tip I had never considered:

If you’re about to have a call with someone, ask AI,

“I’m about to talk to Bob who handles Product Marketing. Based on my calendar, emails, and chat, is there anything I need to discuss with Bob that I might have forgotten or that he might help me with?”

Brilliant. I’ve used this dozens of times since and it’s helped me “unforget” more things than my middle-aged ego would like to admit.

Your organization needs to learn and grow together. I promise you that there are some incredibly innovative uses for AI floating around your organization, they’re just not being shared and collaborated on.

Everything is better with friends. AI is no exception.

* * *

If you’ve found other ways to apply this, I’d be interested to hear what’s working. You can reply to this email or reach out on LinkedIn.

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