A Netflix scene stopped me in my tracks this week.
In Person of Interest, Harold Finch is posing as a maths teacher when a student asks the question every teacher dreads.
"When would we ever use this?"
His answer, about pi, is worth a minute of your day:
It keeps on going forever without ever repeating. Which means that contained within this string of decimals is every single other number. Your birth date. The combination to your locker. Everything we ever say or do, all of the world's infinite possibilities, rest within this one simple circle. What you do with that information, what it's good for... well, that would be up to you.
I've thought about it far more than anyone should think about a TV show. (Nerd. Guilty.) Because I can't stop thinking about how well that describes AI.
Everything is in there
AI contains almost everything.
Every marketing plan. Every email sequence. Every sales script you'll ever need. Every product description, job advert, staff handbook and difficult letter to a supplier.
It's all in there somewhere. And that's exactly the problem.
Pi "contains" your locker combination. But you'd never find it without knowing precisely what to look for. You could stare at the decimals for the rest of your life and never spot it.
AI is the same. Infinite possibility is worthless without a good question.
I spend a lot of time with business owners talking about AI right now, and the same pattern keeps showing up. The ones winning with it have clearer questions. Most of them are using the same apps you can open on your phone.
If you're not getting useful answers from AI, you're probably asking the wrong things. Or asking the right things badly.
"Write me a marketing email" gets you something bland that sounds like everyone else. Of course it does. You've given it nothing to work with.
What a clear question looks like
A clear question tells AI the things a good colleague would need to know before they started. Who it's for. What they care about. What you want them to do next. What you sound like. What you've tried before, and what happened.
Give it that, and the answers change completely. You stop getting the average of the internet and start getting something that sounds like it came from your business.
Then treat the first answer as a first draft. Push back on it. Tell it what's wrong. Ask it what it would need to know to do better. The best results almost always come on the third or fourth go.
Helping business owners fix this has become a big part of my work. So what's the last thing you asked AI that gave you a rubbish answer? Drop me a message and I'll tell you how I'd ask it.
