As a leader, how are you using AI? How about with your team?
I posed that question to a group of amazing leaders last fall in the AI Studio at Grace Hopper Celebration—just before every single leader built their own simple app, using just a GenAI web chat. That short activity was all it took for these amazing humans to be shocked, impressed, inspired, and maybe a little freaked out by AI capabilities. For many, this was the first time they realized the sheer building power that is now available to any human with a web browser. They realized that they, too, could be builders (or return to building/coding, as I have). After the exercise, I asked each person to share what they had learned and built afterwards, with someone who couldn’t attend our session. To pay it forward, to help someone else learn—while reinforcing learning for themselves. And, ideally, to do that sharing with their teams, to encourage their teams to learn and grow, explore and experiment with them.
This post takes you through a similar exercise, and beyond a bit, too.
Getting Started
Let’s get right to it: Open up a browser window and navigate to a GenAI chat interface, either claude.ai or chatgpt.com for this exercise. Important: You don’t need to pay. Start with a free plan.
If you haven’t done this before, don’t kick yourself. The best time to plant this tree was perhaps awhile ago—but the second best time is now.
When you’re set up, logged in, etc, and the system asks what you want to do, enter this text/prompt:
“I want you to write and run a javascript app in an artifact window for me. Please choose a fun option for a visual app that you can write and run this way. Then, go ahead and build it for me. Please provide instructions for how I play with or use the app, and also show me the code you created to make it for me. Please don’t ask me any clarifying questions, just create a fun example of what you can do.”
What app did you get? Try it again with a different GenAI program. This time, try making suggestions for colors, options in the app, visualization methods, and more.
More Practice
If you’ve already started using AI personally or with your team, where are you finding value? Are you using AI in meetings, having the meeting agent catch you up when you’re late or stopped paying attention? Do you ask GenAI to track down basic (or complex) data for you, have it create market/competitor/product/etc reports? Have you automated workflows and document creation? Have you designed and built your own apps to make your work more joyful or help you work on your own growth areas?
A simple powerful practice is to use GenAI to help argue for AND AGAINST a point you’re trying to make. This method can help you critically evaluate a topic, deepening and speeding your learning and understanding. It can also help you check your assumptions. Example prompt for evaluating the planning fallacy:
“Please find a total of six credible peer-reviewed resources, three for and three against the following statement: Humans frequently underestimate the time, cost, and risk of future work if they don’t plan it out in a relatively granular way.”
Ok, you’ll probably want to choose something more fun than that. I mean, large project overrun is super annoying and costly, but not fun. To help your team get started you can definitely go lighter: “Please find a total of four credible peer-reviewed resources, two for and two against the following statement: Ice cream can be part of a balanced breakfast.”
Note: My prompts in this post have plenty of room for improvement. There are hundreds of sites and YouTubers that can help you write great prompts for GenAI. AND you can also ask for help from GenAI itself:
“Please help me write a great prompt for thinking critically about…”
“Please ask me three clarifying questions that will help me to deepen my thinking and write a crticial evaluation prompt…”
Time to Practice
There’s no time like the present to get started. AI is rapidly changing how work done within individual roles, the way value is created and flows across teams, and even changing the structure of organizations. And, after you practice, please invite others. Especially invite your team to practice and learn with you. If you don’t practice, your team may not have the inspiration to practice—or the safety. Leaders modeling AI learning and usage are much more likely to have team members using it effectively, too. How will you practice today?
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References and additional reading
+ Vibe Coding by Gene Kim for exercises that take you from zero to vibe coding with agent teams. My first interactions with Claude and ChatGPT writing code for me (as someone who hadn’t coded for well over a decade) are included as a case study in that book.
+ Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI-Native by Melissa M. Reeve for more on how AI might changing roles, organizational structure and value flow in organizations.
+ Robot-Proof: When Machines Have all the Answers, Build Better People by Vivienne Ming