Have you ever had this moment:

You've worked at a business for several years, you're really starting to understand how it works. You're grokking it. You're gaining a deep understanding of the innerworkings, outer-workings, and every kind of work-between.

And you suddenly have it - a moment of insight - a blinding flash that helps you to solve a problem you've been stuck on.

They're great when the happen. But how often do they really occur for you? For the lucky, perhaps several times a year. For the rest of us, less often.

One of the great promises of AI is to be able to achieve these types of insights faster and more repeatedly by asking the right questions.

AI will allow us, as it becomes more ubiquitous, to ask better questions and find the answers faster.

Here are the stages of inspiration and insight as we move forward with Assisted Inspiration (we need a new acronym).

1. Human-Only Insight - the amazing and super-powerful capability that we humans possess to understand our world and make amazing leaps forward. Pattern recognition, dreams, emotional resilience, quantum gravity. It's all part of it.

2. Tool Assisted Insight - explicit use of math and spreadsheets and literature to figure stuff out, in addition to our own powerful minds.

3. AI Assisted Insight - use of machine learning and other sophisticated computer tools to value information and create models for problem solving.

As we get better at formulating our questions, generating and processing data, and creating these models - as these skills become more pervasive in the workforce - then the pace of AI Assisted Insights is only going to INCREASE. Think the world is going fast now? Think it's changing? Think we're in a VUCA phase?

Buckle your seat-belt. As our kids join the workforce and spend less time writing code (it probably really will happen this time) and more time thinking about problems and using AI to assist them, the more the pace of change will accelerate.

Will this be challenging at times? Yes, definitely. It also represent a fundamental new phase of work, life, and society.

What an amazing time to be alive.

I've been lucky enough to have some human-only and data-assisted insights in my life. Those moments are joyful when they occur. They are real breakthroughs when you see things in a whole new light.

Imagine having more of those. More breakthroughs. More insight. More inspiration. It will be challenging, and for those of who are willing to face these challenges a broad new plateau of opportunity and human potential awaits us.

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash.