Minyang Jiang on AI augmentation, transcending constraints, fostering creativity, and the levers of AI strategy

What are the goals I really want to attain professionally and personally? I’m going to really keep my eye on that. And how do I make sure that I use AI in a way that’s going to help me get there—and also not use it in a way that doesn’t help me get there?

– Minyang Jiang (MJ)

About Minyang Jiang (MJ)

Minyang Jiang (MJ) is Chief Strategy Officer at business lending firm Credibly, leading and implementing the company’s growth strategy. Previously she held a range of leadership positions at Ford Motor Company, most recently as founder and CEO of GoRide Health, a mobility startup within Ford.

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Minyang “MJ” Jiang

Minyang “MJ” Jiang

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Minyang “MJ” Jiang

What you will learn

• Using ai to overcome human constraints

• Redefining productivity through augmentation

• Nurturing curiosity in the modern workplace

• Building trust in an ai-first strategy

• The role of imagination in future planning

• Why leaders must engage with ai hands-on

• Separating the product from the person

Episode Resources

Transcript

Ross Dawson: MJ, it’s a delight to have you on the show.

Minyang “MJ” Jiang: I’m so excited to be here, Ross.

Ross: So I gather that you believe that we can be more than we are. So how do we do that? 

MJ: Absolutely I’m an eternal optimist, so I’m always—I’m a big believer in technology’s ability to help enable humans to be more if we’re thoughtful with it.

Ross: So where do we start? 

MJ: Well, we can start maybe by thinking through some of the use cases that I think AI, and in particular, generative AI, can help humans, right?

I come from a business alternative financing perspective, but my background is in business, and I think there’s been a lot of sort of fear and maybe trepidation around what it’s going to do in this space. But my personal understanding is, I don’t know of a single business that is not constrained, right? Employees always have too much to do. There are things they don’t like to do. There’s capacity issues.

So for me, already, there’s three very clear use cases where I think AI and generative AI can help humans augment what they do. So number one is, if you have any capacity constraints, that is a great place to be deploying AI because already we’re not delivering a good experience. And so any ability for you to free up constraints, whether it’s volume or being able to reach more people—especially if you’re already resource-constrained (I argue every business is resource-constrained)—that’s a great use case, right?

The second thing is working on a use case where you are already really good at something, and you’re repeating this task over and over, so there’s no originality. You’re not really learning from it anymore, but you’re expected to do it because it’s an expected part of your work, and it delivers value, but it’s not something that you, as a human, you’re learning or gaining from it.

So if you can use AI to free up that part, then I think it’s wonderful, right? So that you can actually then free up your bandwidth to do more interesting things and to actually problem-solve and deploy critical thinking.

And then I think the third case is just, there are types of work out there that are just incredibly monotonous and also require you to spend a lot of time thinking through things that are of little value, but again, need to be done, right? So that’s also a great place where you can displace some of the drudgery and the monotony associated with certain tasks.

So those are three things already that I’m using in my professional life, and I would encourage others to use in order to augment what they do.

Ross: So that’s fantastic. I think the focus on constraints is particularly important because people don’t actually recognize it, but we’ve got constraints on all sides, and there’s so much which we can free up.

MJ: Yes, I mean, I think everybody knows, right? You’re constrained in terms of energy, you’re constrained in terms of time and budget and bandwidth, and we’re constrained all the time.

So using AI in a way that helps you free up your own constraints so that it allows you to ask bigger and better questions—it doesn’t displace curiosity. And I think a curious mind is one of the best assets that humans have.

So being able to explore bigger things, and think about new problems and more complicated problems. And I see that at work all the time, where people are then creating new use cases, right? And it just sort of compounds.

I think there’s new kinds of growth and opportunities that come with that, as well as freeing up constraints.

Ross: I think that’s critically important. Everyone says when you go to a motivational keynote, they say, “Curiosity, be curious,” and so on. But I think we, in a way, we’ve been sort of shunned.

The way work works is: just do your job. It doesn’t train us to be curious. So if, let’s say, we get to a job or workplace where we can say—we’re in a position of work where you can say—all right, well, all the routine stuff, all the monotony, we’ve done. Your job is to be curious.

How do we help people get to that thing of taking the blinkers off and opening up and exploring?

MJ: I mean, I think that would be an amazing future to live in, right? I mean, I think that if you can live in a world where you are asked to think—where you’re at the entry level, you’re asked to really use critical thinking and to be able to build things faster and come up with creative solutions using these technologies as assistance—wouldn’t that be a better future for us all?

And actually, I personally would argue and believe that curiosity is going to be in high demand, way higher demand than it’s been in the future, because there is this element of spontaneous—like spontaneous thinking—which AI is not capable of right now, that humans are capable of.

And you see that in sort of—even sort of personal interactions, right? A lot of people use these tools as a way to validate and continue to reinforce how they think. But we all know the best friendships and the best conversations come from being called out and being challenged and discovering new things about yourself and the thing.

And that same sentiment works professionally. I think curiosity is going to be in high demand, and it’s going to be a sort of place of entry in terms of critical thinking, because those are the people that can use these tools to their best advantage, to come up with new opportunities and also solve new problems.

Ross: So I think, I mean, there is this—I say—I think those who are curious will, as you say, be highly valued, be able to create a lot of value. But I think there are many other people that have latent curiosity, as in, they would be curious if they got there, but they have been trained through school and university and their job to just get on with the job and study for the exam and things like that.

So how do we nurture curiosity in a workplace, or around us, or within?

MJ: I mean, I think this is where you do have this very powerful tool that is chat-based, for the most part, that you don’t require super technical skills to be able to access. At least today, the accessibility of AI is powerful, and it’s very democratizing.

You can be an artist now if you have these impulses but never got the training. Or you can be a better writer. You can come up with ideas. You can be a better entrepreneur. You can be a better speaker.

It doesn’t mean you don’t have to put in the work—because I still think you have to put in the work—but it allows people to evolve their identity and what they’re good at.

What it’s going to do, in my mind, rather than these big words like displacement or replacement, is it’s going to just increase and enhance competition.

There’s a great Wharton professor, Stefano Plutoni, who talked about photography before the age of digital photography—where people had to really work on making sure that your shutter speed was correct, you had the right aperture, and then you were in the darkroom, developing things.

But once you had digital photography, a lot of people could do those things. So we got more photographers, right? We actually got more people who were enamored with the art and could actually do it.

And so some of that, I think, is going to happen—there’s going to be a layering and proliferation of skills, and it’s going to create additional competition. But it’s also going to create new identities around: what does it mean to be creative? What does it mean to be an artist? What does it mean to be a good writer?

In my mind, those are going to be higher levels of performance. I think everyone having access to these tools now can start experimenting, and companies should be encouraging their employees to explore their new skills.

You may have someone who is a programmer who is actually really creative on the side and would have been a really good graphic artist if they had the training. So allowing that person to experiment and demonstrate their fluidity, and building in time to pursue these additional skill sets to bring them back to th