What Executives and Tarot Readers Are Chatting Up

 In corporate conference calls from March 15 to June 9, 2023, executives chatted up "AI," using the term 110 times. That kind of buzz can boost the stock and generate quite the media coverage. Also, more and more clients for my Tarot reading service are asking about how AI could change the trajectory of their careers. 

In contrast members of the C-Suite mentioned the term "ESG" only 74 times. The latter was down from 156 times in Q4 in 2021. Meanwhile funds pouring into ESG investments hit their lowest level in seven years in 2022. Here are more details from Yahoo Finance. An exception are governance issues. Activist investors are engaging in proxy battles. 

That was fast, that is the souring of corporate and investor preoccupation with what is supposed to signal "doing good." Large law firms are careful players. So it had been a well-thought-out move for elite Paul Weiss to create the first-ever ESG practice in Spring 2020. That was to guide corporations about the values shift from one-dimensional attention on shareholders to other constituents such as employees and communities and planet earth. Soon enough not only did other law firms follow Paul Weiss, so did corporations which set up their own in-house ESG functions. American institutions went woke.

That was then.

It is unlikely that ESG will be a core election issue. The economy is. And increasingly the parts of the economy which affect both businesses and individual voters are the benefits and the perils of AI. Once an exotic term AI has become integrated into the lingo on Main Street. On the human check-out lines in Walmart there is trash talk by customers that those jobs will soon be taken over by AI. 

Already, those hiring want to know the nuts-and-bolts of your experience with AI and the results you achieved. That applies even to gig assignments. For contract work three times I landed interviews because I had work products for which I had used AI. I even have an AI blog.

It's from clients of law firms that the push is coming in that sector to use AI for case management. Those with that technical expertise could wind up in more demand than brandname lawyers. Yeah, poach that AI expert from Cravath to come to Kirkland & Ellis. That will make the headlines. Rating groups of law firms could add the criteria about how effectively they leverage AI.

For public relations/marketing communications in some businesses the applications have become standard. There is the gush about the AI magic in reducing the cost of a major promotion to about 10% of the usual expense. The lion's share is about graphics. Meanwhile communications powerhouse Edelman has terminated 240, mostly senior players. It announced it is focusing on how to grow. One has to assume that entails more AI. 

In the massive services for the aging niche, at the AI for Good Global Summit they featured Nadine, an AI servant who can keep us boomers less isolated and more independent. Nadine simulates the human connection. She will engage with us in conversation, sing and play games.

Recently I debated if, instead of adopting another dog since I am in my 70s, I should just save my money to special-order a Nadine than looks, behaves and smells like a canine.

That can help me move more quickly through the grieving process since my 13-year-old four-legger Arizona passed on to another dimension six weeks ago. We used to journey to Lake Erie together twice a week. I can't bear to go there now. But that could change if Nadine comes into my life and she belts out Beatles songs on the way to the Lake. Aging can intensify pet grief. 

Back to business: So, should all those enterprises, especially professional services, which bet big on ESG begin to dismantle those units? 

No surprise Paul Weiss, along with myriad other large law firms such as Gibson Dunn, have launched AI practices (for Paul Weiss they are both transactional and litigation). It makes sense to plow more resources into them than into the ESG ones established and expanded during the past few years. Some recall that in September 2021 Paul Weiss launched the ESG and Law Institute. One wonders if demand remains brisk for what the Institute provides. 

Despite all the panic about AI's impacts on employment, the concept of a technology that learns and keeps learning, applying the knowledge, is thrilling. That's exactly why we ChatGPT users are encouraged to provide feedback about what kind of service it delivered. "It," we are told, will incorporate that data to become smarter. 

A student of William Shakespeare (I have a Ph.D. in literature) I have always had reservations about the impacts of ESG to change the world for the better. When I taught Shakespeare's history/tragedy plays I zeroed in on the meme that human beings are "cankered in the grain." That is another way of positioning and packaging the Roman Catholic concept of original sin and psychologist Carl Jung's introduction of man's shadow side. In the Tarot, the Devil card signifies that darkness. 

However, I experience that AI has so far moved the dial on just about every aspect of the human condition. And, seemingly for the better.

Knowledge Workers should be less haughty. That is showing up in the chatter on professional anonymous networks such as Fishbowl Consulting. And the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street and in the cloud at IBM got it how expendable they are. In itself that ego deflation could make mankind less driven by the brutalities of capitalism. Incidentally those have become so ugly that more of my corporate clients are searching for work in non-profits. 

Tarot Card Reader. Medium. Intuitive Career Coach.

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