Young Professionals’ Appropriate AI

I coach early- to mid-career people working in projects. These young professionals generally want to add value for their current project teams and company, and, at the same time, to develop know-how pertinent to their career and ideals long-term.

About how to go forward in these ways, they typically bring their own initial goals. I usually find that these are very good, and so our work together tends to begin with them.

In these initial goals, I have seen an enormous change over the last three years. The change suggests that young professionals (YP) today are facing a new world, one that deeply excites and deeply concerns them. Let me explain.

c. 2013 - 2023 Project Management via Project Discourse

Starting about 2013, the initial goals that young professionals (YP’s) in project settings were coming to achieve typically fell under 2 or 3 of these rubrics

• Become PMP certified

• Initiate a Project –  Create vision, business case, value proposition, charter, life cycle

• Manage Waterfall Projects – Phases, Processes, PDCA, risk, scope, schedule, budget; WBS, CPM, EVA KPI’s

• Contribute to Agile Projects  –  Roles, Iterations, Scrum, MVP/User Story/Product Backlog constructs, skills

Based on these initial goals, YP’s seemed to envision a future of managing activities to achieve project team purposes.They expected to be using discourse – connected text – about projects, produced by themselves and by human co-workers, past or present. The discourse would be synchronous and asynchronous, typically mediated by IT, e.g., by internet services and proprietary enterprise process assets in the form of CRMs, ERPs, etc.  Of course, any specific project required that its discourse be co-created in turns, threads, groups, and networks by performing and client organizations and project team members. To the general vocabulary, semantics, and pragmatics of this project discourse, PMI’s PMBOK was a useful guide, while proficiency in the discourse could be demonstrated by a PMP.

c. 2023 -> Career Collaboration via AI

Over the last three years, YP’s have come with initial goals very different than project management. They want to

• Leverage AI Appropriately

• Get a (Better) Job

• Improve Relations with Boss (e.g. initiate, repair, enhance, exploit)

• Facilitate Joint Design (with external stakeholders)

The initial focus of YP’s wanting coaching today seems not at the level of project. Of course, they care about projects but what they prioritize are relationships in organizations that do projects. They focus on relations, memberships and networks. They seem most concerned about their collaborations, including collaborations with AI partners.

They know that the discourse they’ll need to collaborate in will not be produced only by humans, As suggested by their AI goal here, they know that they will now have ongoing conversations, direct and indirect, with LLM’s, AI agents, and generative AI systems, powerful systems with access, very often, to enormous networks, global and proprietary.

In effect, for YP’s today, these AI interlocutors are new partners, co-workers, and advisors. YP’s know that these interlocutors can, in effect, become colleagues, friends, and/or co-intrapreneurs. By these collaborations, YP’s can grow their own competence and impact, their team productivity, their organisation’s assets, and their professional careers.

At the same time, YP’s know that these AI interlocutors exist for the purposes of the organizations that fund, instruct, and train them.  Thus, enterprise AI can become, in effect, YP competitors and YP bosses.They may even be trained in the role of spy, gate-keeper, or YP saboteur. These are the dimensions of their new contexts that YP’s feel up against. Thus, their concerns about privacy, social networks, cybersecurity, employer transparency, personal branding, and online reputation management.

Their deepest concern seems to be, as they say, to “leverage AI appropriately”. Of course, they want to be able to converse fluently with these new interlocutors, at work, in other organizations, and privately. However, these conversations are very different from conversations of three years ago. They are not just in the form of natural language text; they are not just about projects;  and they are not just among humans. This discourse is, instead, meta-media, meta project, and meta discourse.

This “meta project discourse” is essential today to YP collaborations, organizations, and careers, and YP’s are right to prioritize it.  However, for this kind of discourse, there is no PMBOK guidebook. As yet, there are no certifications of proficiency with the credibility of PMI’s PMP.

For the purpose of learning it, however, YP’s I coach are finding that there is an up side to “meta”. Meta project discourse can talk about itself. It can even make maps, pictures and movies of itself. Moreover, it can do so in ways that can be adjusted specifically to any individual YP and their contexts. In short, they find that meta project discourse can be looked at and leveraged as a bespoke tutor, a tutor on meta project discourse itself, and on any specific network, organization, topic, thread, or turn of talk, by human or non-human talkers.

As a bespoke tutor or coach. This is one powerful way that YP’s can look at and use meta project discourse “appropriately”, at least from the standpoint of any individual YP at a given moment.

In several other ways, I see YP’s today looking at and using meta project discourse to “leverage AI appropriately” in their careers. Going forward, I will be writing about some of these ways  here on my Cogent Language blog in posts tagged as “Appropriate AI”. My aim is to support all the YP’s and their coaches, human and cybernetic, that mean to do well and to do good.