The Hidden Value of AI

Most talk about the value of AI is in the realm of answering questions or creation: code, essays, pictures, movies, etc.

But I think an underestimated feature of AI is its ability to understand what you want.  In other words, combine the communications ability of Chat GPT , Grok, etc with non-AI tasks, such as making changes to a spreadsheet, filling in a form, etc.

Think of being able to execute a complex formula, or extensively reformat your document without having to look up extensive menu picks and command key sequences.

The advantage with this way of using AI is that hallucinations, if they occur, are trivial since you know what you want.  For example, if you tell an AI to change the quote in the third paragraph to italics, and it changes it to bold, you can see that, and simply re-tell it to change it to italics.

How much easier would a doctor's day be if he could tell AI:  "Create a pre-authorization for Insurance company ACME, for Mrs. Smith, for an MRI."

(Yes, after all of Wile E. Coyote's injuries, ACME branched out into health insurance :-) )
© 2025 Praveen Puri

Learning and Doing

After you attend a seminar or read a book just pick one or two improvements, ignore the rest, and work on implementing them successfully. You return on investment on the book or seminar will be much higher than if you greedily try to process everything to "get your money's worth".

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Collaboration Versus Groupthink: How to Tell the Difference

When teams are collaborating to design a project solution, they risk falling into groupthink for two reasons: 

   1. they have worked projects in the past, all using one approach.

   2. the team is dominated by one or two strong personalities.

The warning signs are:

    1. The team rapidly makes decisions.

    2. Only one or two approaches are considered.

    3. There is no questioning.

    4. A few people dominate the discussion.

When this occurs, the team leader should start asking questions to provoke more out of the box thinking, such as: What if we could not do X, what would be an alternative?  Let's start with a blank slate. How would you approach the design from scratch.  He/she should also encourage others in the group to give their opinions.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

How to Run a 15-Minute Meeting

Photo by Christina Morillo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-on-conference-room-1181396/

I advise all my clients to run shorter meetings because we are now in the Attention Scarcity Age, where everyone (including employees and managers) are overwhelmed, overworked, and have short attention spans.  

The productivity of longer meetings start to drop after 15 minutes, and participants will start to multitask and lose focus.

The key to keeping meetings short is to:

1. Set a short, focused agenda.

2. Prior to the meeting, send out any background info so the participants are

ready to hit the ground running.

3. During the meeting, ruthlessly focus on that agenda.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Quote for Consulting Success

This quote describes the essence for success in tech, consulting, and business:

"There are no right answers to wrong questions."  - Ursula Le Guin

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Process vs. Content Consulting

I learned from my mentor, famed consultant Alan Weiss, about the power in practicing process consulting vs. content consulting.

What's the difference?

Let's use the examples of a football team, and an aerospace company.  A content expert on the football team might teach them to tackle better, or run better passing routes.  A content expert in the aerospace company might help with a rocket design.  Most likely, these would be separate individuals.

By contrast, the same process consultant could work with both the football team and the aerospace company.  For example, the football team may have created a new offensive strategy for a key opponent, but the players then abandoned the strategy in the middle of the game.  The aerospace company created ambitious plans to build a large rocket ship, but then the project stalls out.  

In both cases, they have the same process issue: they failed to execute on their plans.  The process consultant can help them figure out why, and what to do about it.  It could be a change management issue, missing skillset, or resources issue. It may be that the plan is too ambitious, and they need to follow a more incremental approach.

These days, companies are full of content experts, but because we are in the Attention Scarcity Age, where everyone is over-loaded by constant information and change, process expertise, such as critical thinking, troubleshooting, and communication, is highly needed to help set strategy, innovate, create plans, and execute initiatives.   

I help companies with process issues using my Strategic Simplicity® Framework, CLOUD:

Change simplicity, Language simplicity, Operational simplicity, User simplicity, and Decision simplicity.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

PIN number Puzzle

Can you solve this puzzle?

© 2025 Praveen Puri

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