I Plan To Eliminate Myself From My Job. Let Me Explain.

Happy Monday, dear reader.

This year, I plan to eliminate myself as much as possible from my job. Let me explain. My work is in the field of communications. Much of my day revolves around content strategies, content creation, editorial framing of events, writing, images, video, and pithy, on-point, on-brand messaging that reaches audiences. It’s a professional field where AI will transform (is transforming) this space fast. Better, faster, and smarter tools will replace the bulk of tasks I do, or at least a large chunk of the work I’m paid to do. The creativity and critical thinking of a human will still be required, but a co-pilot AI that will be increasingly intelligent will be heavily in the mix.

Midjourney, AI Sous-Chef

My work at TheRundown.Studio is focused on how communications teams can develop new ways of working with AI, creating content that is both high-quality and that connects with specific audiences. What specific new skill sets are needed? And where do we need to double down on the core values and ethics of storytelling? I am developing comprehensive video content for paid subscribers and building our learning academy backend, to which you will have access.

Old friends with deep media and comms expertise will be part of this, like my friend Femi Oke, my former CNN colleague. She is the co-founder of Moderate the Panel. Here are three tips she has for moderating a successful panel:

Sharing My AI Work Day. Try This.

• Identify and summarize the top public health stories in Africa in the context of the news of the day using Perplexity.AI as we work with a partner in the region. I use both Perplexity to research anything I need and ChatGPT4 or Claude to support thinking or provide writing drafts. The data sets on Africa are not as strong as I would like, so we need to offer more of our own thinking, insights, and knowledge. We are working with our own Africa data sets to augment those in our RAG Wanja (currently in beta)
• Upload large documents to Claude and ask for key points I need to know. I just do not have time to read all the large documents sent to me. Sometimes I give both Claude and GPT4 the same query to see who does better.
• Pitch a new client or update a current client using the slide presentation tool, Tome. I can prompt with one sentence and receive a decent slide presentation almost immediately. Gone are the long keynote and power point days. I enhance and amplify the relatively decent baseline. It’s also easier to put in audio and video. Stable diffusion can create images directly on Tome.
• Quillbot assists me throughout the day as a copy editor, usefully providing paraphrasing or translations. I have the Chrome extension.
• Midjourney provides me with images I need either for client work or for my own marketing efforts. Runway Gen 2 and Pika.Labs get me a few seconds of video for socials. The prompting here is the key.
• Any team or client meetings we have, Otter.AI is there. It saves my team a significant amount of time in transcription. It’s not perfect, but decent. A human has to clean it up.

Next

I will be reviewing text-to-audio platforms like Eleven Labs and video-to-avatar platforms like D-ID and HeyGen. This means I can replace myself as Avatar Zain and never have to wear make-up or blow-dry my hair for a video again. This will save significant time and actually save money and more time on hair color, roots, and highlights! There are lots of safety, danger zones, and ethics to address here.

I will be working on a comprehensive AI guide for producing and consuming content ahead of and during the US elections, as well as the 20+ elections happening in Africa this year. Practical approaches, transparency and ethics, and new security tools to consider in a newsroom.

Shoutout

I want to give a shoutout to No Priors, a podcast series I’ve really been enjoying. This weekend, I listened to two guests while training for my first half-marathon of the year, which is next weekend. Yes. I just threw that in there to impress you! Alyssa Henry, former CEO of Square, and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI, were great company on the run. My takeaways from them are:

• As AI evolves, its tools will become bundled and consolidated into categories. At the moment, there are individual platforms that are more expensive. The best of the breed will survive. Right now, architecture and tools are unbundled.
• Large Language Models will get even more capable (coding assistants, medical assistants, legal assistants), and their chain of logic will be even stronger. There will also be a wider breadth of knowledge. For example, an LLM identifies a key protein and folds it into a way to develop a new drug. Highlighted opportunity area. by Reid: Cybersecurity and AI
• The democratization of content and creativity is going to get even more powerful.

Have a wonderful week ahead. Leaving you with Maya Angelou

If you don’t like something, change it.