ChatGPT peeling peaches

I got home from a trip this week and my son said, “The Smiths brought us all these peaches.”

A huge bowlful – what nice neighbors. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but for this story to make sense you need to know they are on the smallish size, about the size of two golf balls. I was leaning toward making peach cobbler, but wondering if it would be worth it to peel them all.

And I spontaneously had the thought:

I should try to see if ChatGPT could peel those peaches.

I immediately realized that thought was patently ludicrous. But I’m proud of myself for thinking it.

You see, the biggest hurdle in implementing AI in your daily work is simply making it second nature. For a long time I’ve been doing my tasks the same way, just because that’s the way I’ve always done them. But as this weird split-second mental hiccup shows, I’m breaking out of that.

If you’re like a big majority of the respondents to my recent survey of PR pros on AI use (more on that later), you’re probably not wondering if AI can help you write emails faster, let alone peel your fruit.

You’re still trying to figure out where AI can actually save you time without getting you in trouble. And you’ve been too busy to do the research and testing to find out. That’s okay.

Soon, I’ll show you where and how AI can do your repetitive tasks for you. For now, understand that it’s not a question of IF you’ll be a better performer by using AI tools, just when. Here’s proof:

This graphic comes from a new working paper produced by a team of researchers from Harvard, MIT, Wharton, and the Boston Consulting Group. They carefully evaluated high-level output from 750+ BCG consultants across 18 representative tasks. This study showed not only did the consultants using ChatGPT work 25 percent faster than those not using ChatGPT, the quality of their work was also 40 percent better.

The question of whether AI will change our PR work has been answered. But you don’t need to freak out – you’ve got time to learn the best way forward for yourself.

Soon I’ll be sharing a big free resource to help you – watch your emails.

Thoughts on using ChatGPT to help with this piece

You’ve seen how I’ve used these PSes to show how ChatGPT helps me with these weekly posts. Although I am obviously using AI all over the place, I’ve decided not to use it for the composition of these posts. That’s because I realized that I write these like a one-to-one communication. You feel like it’s coming from me, not a robot. So I’m only using ChatGPT for copyediting – the ideas, hooks, phrasing, word choice . . . that’s all me. For this item, the copyediting prompt I gave it showed me I should change “bowl full” to “bowlful” and caught a random letter “a” that for some reason Word’s grammar checker missed. To be sure, Grammarly can already do this kind of copyediting. I’m using ChatGPT for this to continue to experiment and learn how best to use the tool.