Welcome back 🤝

My wife & I are going to Nantucket this week to celebrate our 1 year wedding anniversary! In the spirit of this, it has got me thinking about…relationships.

Over the last few years, I’d say chances are high that you and I have welcomed a new relationship into our lives whether we like it or not and it’s called…artificial intelligence.

A couple questions for you since I’ve been asking myself this recently:

How often are you relying on AI? And how much do you outsource your thought to these tools?

This may feel weird to ponder.

But, I’m going to be vulnerable because using it both personally and professionally has formed some kind of relationship that I haven’t been fully able to explain yet. This edition dives into that along with how you can make your relationship with AI a bit healthier.

Let’s take off.

AI in zeee House

For the last 5 years, me & my wife have had an Alexa Echo (no affiliation) set up in the kitchen. It’s the closest thing we have to a robot in the house.

I love using it because it helps me set timers when I'm cooking. I’d rather vocalize and say: “Alexa, set a timer for 15 minutes” compared to washing my hands then setting a timer on my phone. I could use Siri, but I’m just not a fan of her.

Another example of how we use this mini-robot: if I want to make a sauce for what I just cooked and I have a ton of ingredients in the fridge, but don’t know what could pair well, I ask Alexa to share different sauce recipes from what I have based on what I’m cooking. It’s helpful because cooking some meals without having a sauce can be just…eh, but also again, I don’t have to pick up my phone…

However, I'm beginning to notice how much I'm using it not only for cooking, but for random questions I want answers to during the day. Like me and my wife will be on the couch, we’ll be watching football and something will come to mind and we’ll just ask Alexa the question we want an answer to. These small subtle asks over the years have slowly began to occur more and more.

AI in zeee Business

Aside from the cooking and random Q’s, my entire business is built within Claude.

Here’s a look under the hood.

The above is a taste into what it all looks like, but a day doesn’t go by where I’m not using Claude and I’ve only been in business for 3 months. Can’t imagine how I use it during year 3.

This may sound weird, but desk work without AI, seems like the dark age. I couldn’t imagine starting a business without using AI and I will be sharing exactly how I’ve built my business with AI soon.

However, since using these tools for the last 5+ years, from Alexa’s Echo, to ChatGPT’s first public model launch in November of 22’, to my entire business running through Claude with agents set up to do X, Y, and Z, I've begun to wonder:

What type of relationship do I have with these tools?

Checks & Balances

I’d make the bet you’re using AI every week or maybe even everyday in some cases.

As we slowly incorporate it more and more into our routines our relationship with it grows. Similar to how often you use your phone to scroll X, LinkedIn, IG, or TikTok for the last 5-10 years. The relationship we have with these apps varies per individual, but the point remains, the more we use it the more our relationship grows with it.

As our relationship continues to broaden with AI, I believe it’s important we check some boxes because now more then ever, it’s important to form a healthy relationship with these AI tools instead of just blindly using them.

Box 1: Don’t get too reliant where you become less decisive.

As you continue to ask it questions here and there or have it help you write more emails, or however you’re using it, please be cautious of over-dependancy. Human taste and judgement is a valuable currency nowadays, so use it to your advantage. You must be in control and remain decisive despite access to these tools. Outsourcing your decision making to AI is not the way to roll. You can use it to your advantage, but don’t let it take away your decisiveness.

Box 2: Take pride in structure with AI going forward.

Enough with all the random chats every time you use these LLMs. It would be prudent to make separate folders or projects for your repetitive asks or what I like to say, your themes with AI. To me, everyone has themes when using AI. Meaning if you use AI to help you with emails, review documents or ask it questions when you’re traveling, make a project for each of those themes: Emails, Documents, Travel. If you keep coming back to the same themes, they deserve their own space. No more of the laundry list chat log. Clean up the AI chat mess you may have. (Ask AI to help with this if you want).

Box 3: Talk to close friends and family on how they use AI in ways that benefit them.

I feel like talking about AI is still kind of like money today, it’s a taboo topic when it doesn’t need to be. Sure, you may feel it’s personal to you and you don’t want to talk about it, but inviting F&F in to show them how you use it or learning how it betters them, better all of you. You may learn a thing or to from your cousin over Thanksgiving dinner this year if you just ask. We’re in this AI race together, we may as well share how we’re driving (and benefiting from) the cars with one another.

ChatGPT now has over one billion monthly active users…absolutely insane.

On your way out…I have a question:

Last week’s poll: Have you published on LinkedIn before?

Thanks for reading. See you next Tuesday!

PS — Nantucket is supposed to be windy and rainy for me and the wife’s 1-year anni, which is a bummer! But do you really think I’m going to let a little water and air disrupt the energy? Hell nah.

If you have any recs, PLEASE send them…we don’t want to rely on AI while we’re there. JK, I plan on getting referrals from locals on where to go. AI can take a back seat this weekend.

To building together,

Dan

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