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Contextualizing AI: The Key to Leveraging Its Full Potential in Your Business by Cameron Clarkson
Published March 7, 2023 · 77 views on YouTube
What does it mean to “contextualize” AI for your business?
According to Cameron Clarkson, founder of Book Blaster, contextualizing AI means applying a free, widely available technology to a specific person’s problem with deep empathy for who you’re solving it for. He argues the technology itself is “right there and free for everybody to use,” but without context around it, it has no meaning and no value—the value comes from the framing, not the tool.
Why does Cameron say most AI content generators are a “race to the bottom”?
Clarkson says platforms built around generic AI content generation—SEO posts, blog posts, “another Jasper wannabe or chat GPT whatever”—are all competing for the same low-hanging fruit, which he calls “swimming in bloody waters.” He contrasts this with taking the same underlying technology, such as GPT-3, and giving it a specific context, like a local business owner or an author who doesn’t care about the nuances of SEO or conversion funnels and just wants results.
Why does the Calendly example matter for AI strategy?
Clarkson references a comment from Calendly’s founder that the product only made communication “one percent more efficient,” and it still became a billion-dollar company. His takeaway: if you can make any type of communication within a niche just one percent more efficient, using deep understanding of a specific pain point, you can build a business that supports your life—even if the solution doesn’t fully solve the pain, just makes it a little better.
What are the “three Cs” Cameron references from his book?
Clarkson names creativity, collaboration, and context as the three Cs he’s writing about in his upcoming book on the passion economy. He frames context as central to creating value in the current moment: the technology and creativity are broadly accessible, but contextualizing them for a specific audience is what generates meaning and value.
Full video transcript
If you’re not aware of some of these technologies and if you’re not thinking about how they can be applied in different contexts—so the three C’s that I think about for the passion economy, this is from my book that I’m working on, the way the world is moving, the rise of the passion economy, but it’s creativity, collaboration, and context. So much of creating value in this economy, in this moment in time, is about contextualizing technology that’s right there and it’s free for everybody to use, but without that context it doesn’t have that meaning. It doesn’t have that value.
Would you say that when you’re looking at these different tools now in such a fast-paced world, that the AI world is—you’re seeing, with your background especially in the automation world, you’re seeing new ways now to contextualize things that were formerly like “how could you possibly automate something like this,” and then you discover a tool and you’re like, “maybe this is how I could save something here,” because you’ve gone through that experience so many times? Am I understanding that correctly?
Yes, and for local businesses and small businesses, rolling out sleeves and figuring out those mom-and-pop marketing schemes and then executing them—so having a deep empathy for whoever you’re solving problems for is really the key to understanding context. So if you’re really good with AI, if you’re really good with WordPress, whatever it is, you can build a website with anything these days, and we’ve got AI that’s building websites for you. Even that is really going to come down to your ability to use natural language to describe what you want, and then understanding why you’re using language to say that in the first place. It’s going to become much more important to move up that Bloom’s taxonomy and move toward synthesis and higher levels of reasoning, where we don’t have to memorize—that’s just a waste of our energy. We have to think about how to put things together in ways that are meaningful for people.
To bring it back to the local business example: everyone’s talking about doing SEO posts and blog posts using AI, and just grabbing for the low-hanging fruit, and everyone’s coming out with another content generator, like a Jasper wannabe or a ChatGPT whatever. It’s all a race to the bottom with those platforms—those are all platforms swimming in bloody waters. But if you were to take that same technology—let’s look at GPT-3—give it a specific context. So if I’m thinking about a local business owner who doesn’t know about or really care about the nuances of SEO and all these other things—just like how authors don’t really care about the nuances of setting up a funnel, pixels, and conversion rates—they don’t care about that. They just want their book to sell, and want to have enough command over their marketing strategy so that they can feel empowered to sell the book. They’re not trying to become Billie Jean or Darby, they’re not trying to become an expert in any of this—they’re trying to just have enough command to move. And so there are so many different niches now that are begging for this type of seamless—or you don’t even have to go for end-to-end frictionless, like we’re doing with Book Blaster, which I think is a really great goal, and part of the reason why we’re not swept up in the bloody waters of just another content generator.
The founder of Calendly said in one of those interviews, Calendly just makes communication one percent more efficient. That’s it—another billion dollar company. So if you can make any type of communication just one percent more efficient, if you can look at any niche and make communication—which is 90 percent of what we do as humans—make communication within that niche one percent more efficient, you can make enough money to take care of your family and do whatever it is that you love to do. That is what’s most inspiring to me: that with a deep understanding of pain, essentially you can build a solution that, even if it doesn’t absolve that pain, just makes it a little bit better. There’s a lot to be done there.
How I echoed that statement is it always leads back to deep empathy and having meaning—actually having meaning behind it—before besides just making another tool that’s going to be just another content generator.