Embracing Unconventional Paths: The Professional Black Sheep

“We don’t just give creative thinking to the AI, but we actually use the AI to make space for our own creative thinking.”

– Valentina Contini

What you will learn

• Exploring the power of being a professional black sheep
• Using AI as a creative sparring partner
• Bridging the gap between ideas and visuals with AI tools
• Accelerating foresight processes through generative AI
• Unlocking human potential with AI-augmented creativity
• Envisioning immersive future scenarios with digital personas
• Embracing technology to make space for critical thinking

Episode Resources

People

• Leonardo da Vinci
• Refik Anadol

Companies

• NTT

Technical Terms

• AI (Artificial Intelligence)
• Generative AI
• Brain-computer interfaces
• Digital twin
• Futures wheel
• Speculative design
• Large language models (LLM)
• Quantum computing
• Decentralization

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Valentina, it’s awesome to have you on the show.

Valentina Contini: Oh, thank you. Thank you for inviting me here.

Ross: So, you call yourself a professional black sheep. That sounds like a good job to me. So what does that mean?

Valentina: On LinkedIn, a lot of people have very nice, amazing titles or super inspirational quotes. And for me, it was always like, what am I actually?

After a bit of thinking, I realized that wherever I am, I am actually always the one that is different. In the past, as a mechanical engineer, I was building cars for 15 years. That’s kind of weird if you are a woman, and also not really looking like the standard engineer.

Then I changed jobs, and I always ended up being the different one. I was in strategy consulting for a bit, and again, being an engineer in a strategy consulting role was the weird thing—it was not normal. So I’m always the weird one. I think that “professional black sheep” pretty much describes that.

Ross: Well, I think the future is in being weird. I mean, if you’re not weird, then you’re probably not gonna have a job. If you are weird, then you probably will.

Valentina: Yeah, definitely, definitely. I think that’s the main selling point right now.

Ross: So, innovation strategy, I think, is probably a reasonable description of a lot of what you do at the moment. Starting from that, you augment yourself in many ways—you augment your work and so on. How can we augment the process of innovating, making the new faster and better? What are the elements of that? What does that look like?

Valentina: I think a big part of it comes now thanks to AI, for a very specific reason. Since the pandemic, we are not really spending time in working environments together with other people in the same place.

There is less of this exchange that creates innovation and creativity or sparks something out of a random discussion. Generative AI, with the leap it made in the last year, is like your sparring partner that you always have without needing to be among other people.

What is interesting is that generative AI is not just one person—it’s collective knowledge from many people. It has many downsides as well, but focusing on this, I can access many people at the same time when I use a tool like generative AI.

Ross: So that’s, in a way, an individual tool. It’s a creative sparring partner or can augment our creativity. I think we can maybe come back to some of that in various ways, but thinking about an organizational level—going from individual creativity to an innovation process where the organization innovates—what are some of the other pieces of that puzzle?

Valentina: You can use it in many different steps of the way. I think another very important piece is using AI for automating easy, repetitive, and boring tasks so that employees have more time available for their creative thinking.

We don’t just give creative thinking to the AI, but we actually use the AI to make space for our own creative thinking.

I also believe that what is very interesting is I have a very visual brain. In my mind, there are always images of what I envision for the future—whether as a product or an idea. Tools like AI image generators can bridge this gap between the images in my brain and showing other people those images.

I think that’s a very powerful way to actually augment or enhance our capabilities.

Ross: Just on that, though—you are an illustrator as well, correct?

Valentina: Not really. What I’m now working on is a project where we create future scenarios. The narrative is very important, but at the same time, it’s difficult to understand what the future is if you cannot see it.

I use these tools to generate images of the future—products, advertisements, or speculative design. That’s something I would have never been able to do without generative AI tools. It would have taken me years of learning a new skill to make these designs myself.

With this, I just spent two hours chatting with the tool, and the images I wanted came out pretty much on their own. It’s really an incredible paradigm shift because you can acquire new skills without acquiring them.

Ross: Yes, let’s dig into that AI-augmented foresight. Foresight is a discipline with many facets to how it’s done in a thorough way.

Obviously, one element is being able to show people what those futures look like. But where are you seeing or applying tools to augment the foresight process?

Valentina: It’s a topic that I started looking into about two years ago, when GPT-3.5 was out. I was always a bit annoyed that a process like generating scenarios for a company would take so much time. You needed to involve many different people, experts, and stakeholders.

It was a bit frustrating because it’s also the reason why it gets done only once every 3, 4, or 5 years—not more often. In a world where everything changes so fast, doing it just every five years is not enough.

I started experimenting with AI, and there are many methodologies where AI can play to its strengths. For example, a futures wheel, where you would normally need many people to come up with different perspectives on impacts and second-degree impacts. AI is good at looking at large amounts of data and finding connections.

Humans are always filtered by their own bias—in a positive sense. We have our own baggage, education, and culture. AI, on the other hand, brings in a collective bias. It brings many perspectives, though it still depends on where the AI was developed and which data was used to train it.

For example, the bias might lean more Western, Eastern, privileged, or otherwise. But that’s a specific part of the process where AI is extremely helpful.

Of course, you cannot take out critical thinking from the human. AI is just a tool. The human in the loop evaluates the results with critical thinking, deciding if what AI produces is usable or complete nonsense.

Ross: So, thinking about scenarios, one of the outcomes of a scenario process is broadly twofold. First, you have a set of scenarios that you can use to identify strategic options, test strategies, and explore other possibilities.

Second, an important outcome is the changed thinking of those people who participated in the process. If you delegate too much of that to the AI, you just get the scenarios without the benefit of the changed thinking.

Are there ways to use AI-augmented foresight so humans start to think more diversely through the process?

Valentina: It’s always a matter of who you are involving and why you are creating the scenarios. What I find very interesting is when I create scenarios with someone who has never used AI for this kind of exercise.

The realization is often, “Oh wow, I could have never come to this point by myself in a thousand years.” It’s true that the attention goes to the tool, but at the same time, people pay so much attention to the results because they’re a bit scared of the tool. This shift in thinking already starts happening.

For example, I was working with a colleague who is extremely smart. She has a PhD in supercomputing and is an expert in technological innovation in the banking sector. She was amazed by the results that came out of our process.

We generated future states based on technology, societal aspects, value creation, sustainability—all these topics. I did an experiment where I input this research into the AI and asked it to generate four diverse scenarios with opposing uncertainties, along with narrative personas and other details.

The AI used templates I designed and took into account the time horizon we provided. My colleague was incredibly surprised by how specific and credible the AI’s choices were.

So there are two aspects. First, you’re introducing people to a very powerful technology. Second, this amazement opens them up to the results and shifts their thinking.

Ross: So the process changes their thinking because they see possibilities they hadn’t considered before.

Valentina: Yes, exactly. What we also do is use another set of tools. We generate personas from the future, and in workshops, we let people interview these personas.

The personas are AI agents—trained LLMs with specific knowledge about the future scenario and their own background. They know who they are, what their values and challenges are, and so on.

Participants can actually have a conversation with these personas, just like they would interview a customer for a product. It’s immersive and less boring. Instead of just listening to me telling a story, they can ask their own questions and get answers.

It’s very powerful because it engages people directly. They might ask, “What’s the weather like in Japan?” or, “Why are you still working at 11 PM?” The point is not that this persona is actually in the future, but the exercise itself makes the process feel real and relatable.

Ross: Yes, that’s the experiential future—creating an image is one thing, but being able to have a conversation with someone living in the future is far more engaging. It can very easily shift thinking about what’s possible and how to respond to it.

Valentina: Absolutely.

Ross: More generally, you also refer to yourself as an AI-augmented human. I think we’ve already covered quite a few ways in which you do that. How else do you augment yourself?

Valentina: Just looking at my daily life—I’m Italian, I work in Germany in an international company, and I married a French guy. So I use four different languages every day. Switching between languages takes a bit, so I use AI tools for translation when I need to sound proper, especially for work.

I also use AI to kickstart new activities. For example, when I need to organize workshops, I have my boundary conditions: four hours, a specific topic, a goal, and a number of participants. I let AI draft an outline, and then I refine it iteratively.

These are very basic things, but the amount of time you save with this jumpstart is impressive.

On a more advanced level, I use wearables—a smartwatch, a smart ring, and a continuous glucose monitor. The data gets fed into AI tools to analyze my health, wellness, and next steps for longevity.

Another example is art. I never thought I could be an artist, but now I’m learning to create AI-powered digital art. Refik Anadol’s work inspires me. I never thought this would be possible for me, but with AI tools, I’m learning and creating.

I always saw myself as a multipotentialite—someone who can do many things. But I never had the time to develop all those skills. AI removes that barrier. It allows me to move from multipotentialite to polymath because it either does part of the learning for me or accelerates the process.

That, for me, is a paradigm shift.

Ross: I love the word multipotentialite. I believe in human potential—that we’re all capable of so much. We make choices and live one life out of the many we could have led.

As you say, AI now allows us to express more of our potential in ways we never could before.

Valentina: Totally. I also find the idea of creating a digital twin of yourself very interesting—an AI trained on your work, your thoughts, and your way of thinking. It’s a bit Black Mirror-esque, but imagine having a digital twin of Leonardo da Vinci.

We don’t have that, unfortunately. I’m not the most interesting person to replicate, but I would love to see digital twins of the greatest minds.

Ross: So you describe yourself as a techno-futurist. What are the wildest and most exciting possibilities you see when it comes to amplifying human cognition and potential?

Valentina: My wildest dreams always include brain-computer interfaces—being able to connect your brain to a machine, not just in one direction, where your brain controls something, but also the other way around.

It’s a bit like what The Matrix showed—plugging something into your brain and learning everything you need for a task in seconds. That would be my ultimate dream.

A few weeks ago, I was in Japan at the R&D forum of NTT, the company I work for. There were projects that, when put together, showed amazing potential. One project demonstrated how brain waves could control a computer to execute tasks. Another project involved using generative AI to make an avatar dance in specific styles.

If you combine these two projects, you could give a new kind of life to paraplegic people. Imagine a DJ who cannot move anymore—not even a mouse—but who can think. With these technologies, they could “dance” again, not physically but virtually.

It’s an empowering way of using technology. What might look like a small or unimportant project, like making an avatar dance, becomes a life-changing tool when applied in this way.

I’m also a big fan of decentralization—making technology accessible to as many people as possible. It’s complicated and utopian in many ways. Decentralization isn’t always positive; it has its risks. But I believe many things could improve faster if decentralization were real, not just used for speculative purposes like NFTs.

The thing about emerging technologies is that they seem far away until they suddenly arrive. Quantum computing, for example, has been “30 years away” for a long time, but AI was the same. Then suddenly, we had ChatGPT, DALL-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion—all these tools that completely shifted what we thought was possible.

What excites me is how quickly things are going to happen. It will come when we least expect it, and we’ll look back and say, “How did we not see this coming?”

Ross: And what should we be doing to nudge these developments toward a positive future? You’ve mentioned dystopian futures—utopian might be hoping for too much—but what can we do to steer things in the right direction?

Valentina: I think the most important thing is for people to be open to understanding technology before it’s imposed on them.

We need to learn from the past. Could we have avoided some of the negative effects of social media if people had been more aware and open to understanding it earlier? I think so.

A lot of people resist new technologies until they’re mainstream. By then, it’s often too late to influence how those technologies are implemented. If people started earlier—learning, experimenting, and being open to these tools—they could make more informed decisions. They could choose whether or not to use the technology before it becomes unavoidable.

For me, education and open-mindedness are the most powerful tools we have right now.

Ross: Yep, I agree. We need to be open to technology and engage with it. The more we use it, the more open-minded we become. It’s a virtuous cycle, but we need to start.

Where can people go to find out more about you and your work?

Valentina: Good question.

Ross: Do you have a website?

Valentina: Yeah, I have a website, but it’s not really up to date. I write sometimes on LinkedIn. The point is, sometimes I’m so busy learning new stuff and figuring out how to use it that I don’t take the time to talk about what I’m doing.

So my website gets updated probably once a year, and my LinkedIn a bit more often than that.

I’m also writing a chapter for an AI and ethics book that will be coming out next year. It’s definitely being published in Europe, but I’m not sure if it will be sold outside of Europe. I’m not so informed about the marketing plan for that.

Otherwise, just contact me on LinkedIn. I’m doing this cool stuff not only for fun in my free time but also as part of my main job.

Ross: Indeed. All right, excellent. Thank you so much for your time, your insights, and your fascinating work, Valentina.

Valentina: Oh, thank you for taking the time.