Jaime Teevan on the Future of Work with AI and the Power of Conversation
Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s first Chief Scientist, has a unique perspective developed from her years researching work productivity and collaboration. Her insights are especially critical as we navigate the shift to an AI-driven workplace. In 2023, Time recognized her as one of the top 100 people shaping the future of AI. In this episode of the WorkLab podcast, hosted by Molly Wood, Teevan shares key insights from her research, focusing on the expanding importance of conversations and creativity with AI, and how leaders can encourage a more creative approach to unlocking the full potential of this technology.
Three Key Takeaways from the Conversation:
- Don’t Fear the Prompt: Unsure how to get started with AI? Ask the AI itself for assistance. Teevan points out that a common mistake is assuming you must have all the answers before using AI. Simply ask the AI to help you formulate a good prompt.
- Conversation is Key: The era of AI marks a shift from simple commands to natural language interaction, making conversations with technology—and with other people—more critical than ever.
- Embrace AI’s Creative Potential: Teevan encourages creative thinking to fully exploit AI’s potential. Embrace its capacity for brainstorming, ideation, and generating new ideas.
Asking AI for Help: A New Approach to Prompting
Teevan emphasizes a fundamental shift in how we interact with AI, especially large language models. Many users mistakenly believe they must know exactly what they want from the outset. There’s a simpler approach: begin by asking the AI for help in crafting effective prompts. As Teevan puts it, “If you want to figure out how to prompt a model well, one great way is to just ask the model to help you.” This approach helps users overcome any hesitation. It suggests that AI models can share the burden of planning and reasoning, making it easier to get good results.
The Growing Importance of Conversations
The evolution of technology has allowed us to move away from simple commands into a world of natural language interaction. This shift makes conversations increasingly important. As Teevan observes, “Our work is essentially becoming having interesting conversations with our computer and with other people.”
Unleashing Creativity with AI
Teevan challenges people to harness AI’s full potential by approaching it more creatively. She highlights AI’s capacity to serve as a partner in brainstorming and generating new concepts. She uses the analogy of maps: paper maps provide a function but modern digital maps open up navigation, traffic prediction, and ride-sharing capabilities. Similarly, Teevan envisions AI transforming work by changing how we get things done and how teams collaborate.
The Significance of Copilot
Microsoft’s Copilot is a key example of how this research translates into real-world applications. It integrates years of research into productivity to provide practical assistance, changing how individuals and teams collaborate. Copilot can facilitate idea creation and help teams refine their ideas.
The Shift from Individual to Collective Productivity
Copilot, and similar tools, address these key aspects of productivity and collaboration. These tools are not just useful for individual tasks but are critical for group productivity. For example, documents can be used to ground a language model, turning an organization’s data into valuable reasoning material used in collaboration.
The Role of AI Agents
AI agents, designed to carry out tasks and processes autonomously, are another crucial piece of the puzzle. They are able to perform tasks independently to achieve a specific goal and use that to enhance collaboration. An agent could join a meeting to make the conversation more productive or manage long-term projects, coordinating the work across both AI and people.
Leveraging the Power of Excel with AI
One area where AI is making a major impact is in data analysis within applications like Excel. Copilot can now extract themes and insights from text data, such as survey responses. This capability supports collective intelligence, allowing organizations to learn from input from multiple people and understand their priorities.
Prompts and the Importance of Politeness
The key to success with AI often lies in the prompts, and in recognizing that it is appropriate to ask for help from the AI itself to create those prompts. Similarly, Teevan’s point about being polite to the model is key: language models, trained on language patterns, will mirror not just the content of your inputs but also the tone.
Molly Wood, the host of the WorkLab podcast, asked Teevan about real-world applications. Teevan talked about the importance of idea generation, using language models to generate ideas, and feedback. And she then brought up tools for organizing thoughts and how it helps her to start the day by having Copilot comb through emails. This helps to create an organizing principle for the day.
WorkLab is a platform where experts share insights and perspectives. As students of the future of work, Microsoft values input from diverse voices. The opinions and findings of the experts we interview are their own and do not reflect Microsoft’s own research or opinions.
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