How Our Community Is Empowering People and Capturing Brilliance
By Ovadia Sutton
SINCE CHATGPT’S 2022 DEBUT, AI HAS SPARKED EXCITEMENT, CONFUSION, AND EVEN FEAR. SOME FORESEE TOTAL TRANSFORMATION, SOME FEAR JOB LOSS, AND OTHERS VIEW IT AS A BUBBLE. WHAT IS GENUINELY VALUABLE? WHAT IS MERELY HYPE? AND WHERE SHOULD A BUSINESS BEGIN?
Across our community, a grounded approach is emerging. Leaders are being challenged to think about AI both critically and robustly. They are focusing on two assets that have always driven our success, our people and the unique domain knowledge cultivated over many years.
EMPOWER YOUR PEOPLE
Much of the public conversation treats people as a cost AI is meant to eliminate, creating resistance before adoption even begins. Leaders cannot simply purchase a platform and expect transformation. Successful adoption begins by building AI literacy, giving employees dedicated time and support to explore, and encouraging curiosity.
At one community company, leaders ran a three-month internal AI competition. Teams got expert support and targeted training to build tools for problems in their own departments. The winning team saved their department 4,500 hours of customer service work in a single month. By creating a culture of adoption, businesses empower their people to reclaim their time, make better decisions, and imagine new possibilities.
BOTTLE YOUR BRILLIANCE
General-purpose AI gives nearly every business access to the same capabilities. Leading businesses must, therefore, take a more focused approach. Rather than beginning with “What can this new AI tool do?” they ask, “What do we do exceptionally well? What important knowledge lives in the minds of a few people at our company? How can we capture that approach and apply it at a greater scale?”
A real estate team in our community is skilled at matching retailers with the markets where they will thrive. A chatbot can suggest familiar names, but it cannot reproduce the team’s read on tenant-market fit.
So they mapped that process and combined it with retailer-performance data to build a recommendation system (similar to Netflix or TikTok’s algorithm) that applies their judgment at scale. Enter an address, and the system assesses which tenants fit that market. The team now evaluates more opportunities and carries its approach into markets it could not have covered by hand.
BUILDING WHAT COMES NEXT
Empowering people and bottling brilliance are not separate strategies. Together, they expand what people can contribute. Automation gives them time back. Insight supports better decisions. Creativity helps imagine new horizons.
The businesses that lead in the years ahead will not be those that chase every new platform or try to remove people from the equation. They will create cultures in which people have the confidence to experiment while capturing the knowledge their companies have worked hard to develop and turn it into a compounding advantage. For more information, contact ovadia@daatlab.com.
Ovadia Sutton is the founder of Daat Lab and holds an MS in Artificial Intelligence. He helps community businesses build cultures of AI adoption, solve practical problems, and develop machine-learning products that turn their distinctive knowledge into new opportunities for growth.
