I absolutely love words.  I love the feel of them on my tongue, the beauty of them in the pages of old books, the sounds of them in my ears. The weird and wonderful origins of them.   I love poetry, classical novels, medieval prayer books.  I was the child with the torch under the duvet long after lights out. I studied English Literature, and my final MBA dissertation was in Strategic Discourse. I learned the beautiful languages – French, Italian, Latin – and the strong languages – German, Anglo-Saxon, Greek.

Words make us human. Spoken, written, rapped, sung or whispered. They allow us to connect with each other. They transport us to previous eras, to other people’s experiences and – ultimately – show us that we are not alone. What we feel has been felt before, what we fear has been feared before, and what we love has been loved before.

From the (rather loud) sound of my Dad selling Christmas Paper on Nottingham Market (‘10 sheets for 50p, anyone’), to lectures on Medieval Mysticism at Bristol University, to major Government tender specifications. Words – and the crafting of them – have been my life.

Technology can do calculations, sure, but it will never replace human creativity, the innate human ability to craft language. Or so I thought. I now work as Chief Commercial Officer for AutogenAI – and I have seen the power of Large Language Models. They generate language – and that language genuinely – and somewhat bewilderingly – reads as if a human has written it. They have their limitations, sure, but they are exceptionally powerful tools for humans. I am just a little heartbroken – that what I once thought of as a uniquely human capability, can now be performed by computers.

But I am also heartened. Because in the middle of this technological revolution – and that is exactly what this is – humans are still needed. At AutogenAI we say that we are dealing in Augmented Intelligence rather than Artificial Intelligence. Our Clients – and their marketing, bids and proposal teams – are being powered (rather than replaced) by our tools: they are being inspired by ideation, by automatically generated text, and they are finding that it gives them time to add value, to polish and shine, to focus on the Client and the message.  It is turning their writers into knowledge workers and prompt engineers: armed with the power of an LLM connected to their content management system, the newest employee has as much knowledge as that one indispensable employee – that every company has! – who has been around for ever.

As one CEO said to me recently:

‘If we only knew what we know, we would be unstoppable’.

Words just got more powerful – embrace this new normal, beat your competition and turbo-power your growth. Unstoppable indeed.