AI Can Have A Personality (And It Should!) [Newsletter #46]

Hello, AI enthusiasts from all around the world! Welcome to the weekly newsletter for the AI and The Future of Work Podcast.

We don't usually associate AI and personality, but today's guest believes it's now more important than ever. 

After all, there will be a time when our teams have at least one teammate that's not human. 

Today's issue is all about optimizing work with AI and embracing it as a tool to improve our ability to satisfy our customers' demands. 

We also discuss the challenges of creating AI agents that help humans instead of replacing them and much more. 

Let's dive into this week's highlights! 🚀

🎙️ New Podcast Episode With Gou Rao, NeuBird CEO 

We've long believed that AI agents won't have distinct personalities. 

After all, any AI tool that makes our lives easier isn't unique nor does it have a novel way of doing things. 

But what will a work team look like when at least one member is not human?

The answer to this question might be challenging, but Goutham "Gou" Rao is close to finding it. 

He wakes up every day to tweak Hawkeye's personality—and no, Hawkeye is not some human superhero. It's an AI-powered SRE co-pilot, although teams might soon call it a superhero. 

Gou may have been one of Hawkeye's creators, but the software still surprises him every day.

This element of daily surprise is part of the challenge of creating software that acts like a teammate without replacing humans. 

The idea for Hawkeye came after Gou took countless late-night support calls to resolve Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) problems. As Gou recalls, the task was painfully repetitive—like trying to find "multiple needles in multiple haystacks."

That's how he and co-founder Vinod Jayaraman founded NeuBird and created Hawkeye to identify, diagnose, and resolve IT infrastructure issues. 

NeuBird has raised close to $45 million from big names, including Microsoft's VC arm, Mayfield, Stepstone Group, and Prosperity7 Ventures. This isn't Gou's only successful venture in entrepreneurship; he has always been a serial entrepreneur. He also co-founded and sold Portworx for $370 million in 2020. 

He sat down with Dan Turchin, PeopleReign CEO, to discuss how AI will be a key team member in the future, doing the grunt work so humans can focus on  strategy and creativity, and a lot more topics, including:

• How interpreting data is still a human bottleneck that AI can help optimize. 

• Unlocking AI's full potential means letting it answer its own questions, and only relying on a human as a last resort.

• Full automation is coming, but trust hasn't caught up yet, and accountability falls on companies, not AI.

• Gou believes that personality is crucial not only in humans but in AI agents, as well. 

• The key to his success has been learning by doing, so he insists that we jump into the deep end and trust our ability to figure it out. 

🎧Listen to the full episode here to learn more about how Gou embraces AI’s role in the future. He believes it's coming to save us countless hours and allow us to grow as professionals instead of taking us out of the equation. 

📖 AI Fun Fact Article

No, AI isn't taking our jobs away, and there's data to prove it! 

As Emilie Shumway writes in HR Dive, a recent analysis on AI usage has revealed some fascinating results. More people use AI to augment their work instead of automating it. 

The study comes from Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, as part of its Anthropic Economic Index, an initiative aimed at understanding how AI is affecting our work. 

They analyzed more than 4 million user-submitted AI prompts and found that 57% of workers use AI to augment their work. They also discovered that very few occupations make substantial use of AI. 

Only 4% of jobs used AI coding tools for 75% or more of their tasks. If we compare that with more than 33% using AI for at least 25%, no evidence in the study suggests total job automation. 

These findings mirror Indeed's assessment last fall. That report concluded that while generative AI could assist in various tasks, it was not "very likely" to replace a human worker in any skill.

So, what does Dan Turchin, PeopleReign CEO, think about this? 

It's always crucial to remember that human nature changes more slowly than technology. 

Even today's most advanced agentic AI applications aren't nearly ready to replace the best humans. AI has demonstrated exceptional abilities to write Ph.D.-level research reports and code new apps, but it can't replace the very human pursuit of knowing the right questions to ask and telling stories. 

After all, this is the way to get other humans excited about AI's output. More importantly—and this is the point we reiterate weekly on this podcast—replacing human empathy and rational thinking should never be the goal.

Let's strive to use AI to augment humans where we need help. Attempting to replace us will only erode trust and impede the incredible progress we're making.

Worth a Read! 📚

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Until next time, stay curious! 🤔

That's a Wrap for This Week!

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