Can you still back up your car without the rear camera? I hope so.
It’s not a requirement these days, and the instances where you don’t have the rear camera may be few and far between. But they still exist.
You might borrow a buddy’s car or be in a rental car where it’s not an option. And then without the tech, would you still be able to drive?
This is what I’ve been thinking about since the, relatively, brief CloudFlare outage the other week.
Our entire work as marketers, consultants, strategists relies on the sites, data centres, engineers and whatnot that are simultaneously completely removed from our operations. We can’t control how they’re managed. And in a sense, we’re twiddling our thumbs when they go down, waiting, hoping, praying they come back online ASAP.
Over the past year, we’ve all absorbed the “learn it or be left behind” mindset of AI. But do you still know what to do with yourself when it stops? Can you access what you need if it goes down?
Here are two ways to protect yourself, your work and your clients:
- Integrate with parallel training. AI is there to handle tedious, repetitive tasks so you can focus on the strategy and tactics that actually move the needle. But like running a restaurant, you can’t lead the kitchen if you’ve never run the dishwasher. Go ahead and buy the state-of-the-art dishwasher, but don’t forget how to scrub plates in case it breaks down in the middle of your dinner service. Hold on to your fundamentals and remember what your systems are without an auto-responder at your fingertips.
- Build resilient workflows: Do you have offline back ups of your work and workflows? When was the last time you flexed the brainstorm muscle on your own? Do you know what you would do without the AI notetaker anymore? If the answer is no and I don’t know, you're at risk of operating below your potential the next time an outage hits. Admittedly these outages are not often, but they are a when and not an if. Choose today to pick preparedness over paranoia.
AI integration with protection means pushing into the new frontier, using AI everywhere it creates value, with the discipline to protect your core skills and systems.
