Somebody has to read it
AI makes it easy for marketers to write long documents and presentations. Somebody still has to read them.
It is tempting and easy now to create long documents with AI, like strategy docs, feedback docs and presentations. But don't, because somebody has to read it. We might be saving ourselves time, but we're stealing it from others.
We're now seeing weird new scenarios, where one person gets their robot to write something and sends it to another person, who then gets their robot to summarise it and send feedback. This sounds like a dangerous and slippery path.
I use AI all the time. What I find it really useful for is actually the opposite of long documents. I get AI to help me simplify and understand. In fact, I did an analysis of all my prompts in the last six months, which is a lot of data. The number one prompt was "explain this to me simply".
I do often get AI to read a long doc first. It tells me which bits to read first and what the crux of the argument is, and it checks the sources and the biases. And then I read the doc.
My dad taught me to read non-fiction books this way as a kid. Read the introduction, read the final chapter, read the summaries of each chapter, and you have 80% of the book's thesis. Fiction is different, as I read it to enjoy the book.
So one behaviour I would recommend is to go in the opposite direction. It is easy to use AI to make things sound good, sound clever, sound polished and feel professional. Use it to strip away the polish, the corporate language and all the things we do to make stuff sound good, and get to the crux, which is clarity, understanding and simplicity. AI is really good for that.
As AI becomes a normal part of our lives, we may look back at a time when we had to remind people not to present any slides at a meeting that they hadn't yet read.