Onboarding for AI
In an old episode of his podcast, productivity expert Cal Newport tackles a listener question: "We're drowning in email at work and everything's a chaotic mess. Should we bring in an assistant to help with that?"
Makes sense on the surface. There's too much to do, and it prevents you from focusing on your core work, so why not bring in help? But Cal cautions against it: If your organization is beset by chaos and lacks clear processes, throwing another person into the mix does not help. Instead, he suggests to first get clarity: What needs to happen and how? Write your Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). Once you've got those, you can reassess: it might be that standardizing your processes has brought enough sanity to the organization that further assistance is no longer required. If that's not the case, and there's still too much of work you'd rather not do yourself, then at least a new helping hand has everything they need for maximum success.
In short, don't just hire someone, hand them the keys to your inbox and say, "good luck, kid."
And now to AI
The same holds true, even more so, for AI tools. The AI equivalent to letting a poor unsuspecting soul loose on your inbox and docs would be to just hook up ChatGPT or Claude to your Gmail and Google Drive and claiming victory. Maybe that's enough for a few simple workflow enhancements. But chances are you'll get much better results if you identify and map out the process you want to delegate to the AI. The numerous benefits include:
You'll be forced to articulate what "good" looks like for each of those tasks, and lay out which information sources must be consulted.
You can set up concrete evals that let you iterate and experiment with different AI tools, prompts, parameters etc to get hard data on what works and what doesn't.
You can identify and isolate those parts of the workflow that are deterministic and can therefore be more effectively handled by non-AI software solutions, and rely on the slower and more expensive AI tools for the parts that only they can perform.
Lacking human-level discernment about what information truly matters in a given context means throwing all the data, all the time, at the AI can degrade performance compared to only providing the context that's required for the task.
Just as a human assistant needs proper onboarding documentation to find success in their role, so do AI assistants need help and guidance to do their best.
