Why Purpose Matters More in the Age of AI

A clip from our spring 2025 GenAI workshop for mission-driven teams, with AlignIQ founder Dan Garmat. Recorded April 2025; image generation has improved since.

The opening idea of the workshop: when AI can do more of the steps, the purpose behind the work matters more, not less.

Key takeaways

• As AI handles more tasks, the purpose behind those tasks becomes more important.
• Work becomes less about moving something from step A to step B and more about asking why we’re doing it and whether it’s the right thing to do.
• Through the lens of multiple intelligences, AI excels at a narrow set, such as linguistic and visual-spatial, and still makes visible mistakes.

Try this with your team

Pick a routine task AI could now do for your team. Before automating it, answer: why do we do this at all, and who is it for?

Going further

Our cohort training starts from your mission, not from the tools.

Sources mentioned

• Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983)

Transcript

Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.

Importantly, as you have AI that can handle so many of these tasks, the purpose of why it’s doing these things starts to become more important. Work is less about whether you can take something from step A and translate it to step B. It starts to become more about why are we doing this, and is this the right thing to do?

One thing I was going to talk about is multiple intelligences. We talk about artificial intelligence, but if you look at what AI is actually excelling at, it’s really just these four things. You have linguistic intelligence: as you saw, it can generate reasonable-sounding English. Visual-spatial: it’s able to generate pictures, which are pretty good, although it has errors with hands, you may have seen…