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Working with AI: Striking a Balance Between AI and Humans

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AI Knowhow Episode 80 Overview

  • Effective AI integration in professional services means empowering humans to focus on strategic thinking and critical reasoning, not simply automating their tasks away
  • Asking “What can’t our teams do today?” can reveal valuable new business opportunities uniquely suited to AI-driven solutions
  • Encouraging your team to share and build on each other’s experiences with AI prevents silos, fosters innovation, and drives meaningful operational outcomes

As AI becomes more integrated into everyday business and personal life, the biggest question leaders face is: when should we rely on AI, and when must the human touch prevail?

In this episode of AI Knowhow from Knownwell, host Courtney Baker joins Knownwell CEO David DeWolf and Chief Product and Technology Officer Mohan Rao to explore the fine line between AI augmentation and human intuition. The team uses a recent LinkedIn post from Ethan Mollick as a leaping off point to unpack how leaders can responsibly scale with AI while keeping people empowered, not replaced.

In the post, Mollick shares the results of a recent study that shows students who use AI as a tutor benefit from it, whereas those who use AI to do their work for them end up faring worse on standardized tests. Ethan’s full Substack article on the topic is well worth a read.

Unpacking “The Shopify Memo”

Another highlight of the discussion centers on how AI can elevate human workers to new levels of productivity—echoing a recent high-profile stance in the tech industry. Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lütke told employees in a recent memo that “before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”

David shares how he took the Shopify memo and used it as inspiration to push the Knownwell team to not just utilize AI in new ways but to share their learnings with one another.

“My challenge to our team this past week was, ‘What is one thing we can do this week to actually take a new step to use AI in a new way and put it to work?’” David says. “But here’s the thing that I wanted to see. It’s not just doing something, it’s how do we share it with one another and begin to build on each other’s ideas? Sometimes where AI is getting stuck is in the silos of one person uses it this way and another person uses it this way. But if we pull it together, when you start to collaborate, different people have different ideas. And I think we’re going to start to solve more operational challenges versus some of the more execution tactical challenges.”

Expert Interview: Richard Lin of Anyreach.ai

Special guest Richard Lin, CEO of Anyreach.ai, speaks with Pete Buer about how AI voice agents are transforming customer service and sales. Lin reveals how cloning the “top 1%” of reps isn’t about replacement, but about elevating consistent performance while keeping humans in the loop to label, train, and improve AI systems.

Richard shares a compelling example of AI voice agents’ practical applications in business. A construction company extended its sales hours by one hour, resulting in a significant increase in pipeline opportunities. By implementing AI voice solutions to take calls around the clock, the company could dramatically scale their availability to handle inbound calls, showcasing AI’s potential to unlock missed revenue opportunities.

The good news for all of us humans? Voice agents fully replacing humans isn’t something that’s anywhere on the near-term horizon. Richard uses the example of Waymo’s self-driving vehicle technology as a corollary.

“Waymo has been on the road for about 10 years. And Waymo didn’t get to where it is today on day one,” Richard says. “The reason why is because you actually had to label a bunch of driving data, if you will, from videos to images. A lot of the work that folks think AI is gonna replace is essentially gonna evolve into how do you train AI to be higher quality, higher accuracy, and so forth. And more specifically around voice, that work actually hasn’t been done yet. And the reason why is because only about 1% of the data in the entire world has actually been indexed and trained. And that’s the internet and all the foundational models have pretty much scraped all of it, but the other 99% is private data.”

AI News: Are AI Therapists a Viable Option?

In our AI in the Wild segment, Pete and Courtney dive into the fascinating world of AI therapists. As NPR covered in a story titled The AI therapist can see you now, a recent study from Dartmouth researchers shows that bots can actually help patients with anxiety and depression, raising the provocative question: are people more honest with machines than humans? And can AI help close the gap between the number of people who could benefit from therapy and the number of providers available?

Don’t miss our practical takeaways in this episode—how leaders can approach AI as a mentor rather than just a tool, and why now is the time to experiment, share learnings, and elevate collective intelligence.

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