Redefining Ambition: How AI Empowers Us to Dream Bigger and Innovate Differently

AI is changing many things in our day to day life. I reach out to ChatGPT (with a plus subscription, and use GPT4, always) to ask several things that I would have sought elsewhere before. I reach out to ChatGPT for things that I would not have ever thought of doing before - like quickly creating an image for something I am posting by asking for it. Or to generate the code for something that I have designed.

I have also noticed that more often than not, I am expecting to have a conversation with AI tools, as opposed to most things being done one thing at a time, fire and forget. For example, if I was looking for something online before, I would try to ask a search query, and maybe refine it till the query gives me what I want. Now, I can just chat with AI to get what I want.

Another longer term effect is that I see myself aiming for more ambitious things than I used to before. Part of it is because AI tools have made it possible to aim higher. Another is as a career upskilling thing - as AI automates away some previous job functions, the expectation at work for each person will be to do more than what they did before, within their domain or engulfing peripheral functions. A third factor is that it has become harder to build differentiated and defensible businesses in the software domain, since many past business differentiators are now easily commoditized via AI. So, not only can we aim for more complex and broader things, but we also need to aim for new ways to differentiate ourselves based on what we build.

It is not fully clear and established as to what becomes the norm for innovation in this new world. Maybe it is creating new forms of content. Maybe it is creating existing or new forms of content rapidly. Maybe it is leveraging multi-agent and multimodal facets to build more holistic experiences. Maybe the secret sauce is finding the right balance between AI, heuristics and human actions that is optimal for a given problem.

This is what my gut tells me - when the dust settles, what will remain is very different from what used to be the norm. It requires us to reexamine not just the solutions, or AI's role in it, but to reexamine everything in a fresh perspective - from problems to approaches to roles of different available components and tools to differentiation and defensibility of business.