Earlier this week, I recorded a talk called “AI: The Good, Bad, and the Future.”  I talked about some of the good things that have happened with AI and some of the Bad. But what I really wanted to focus on was the future. I think many of us have heard the two letters AI so much that we are pretty tired of it. It's been very beneficial, and I still use it every day to assist and boost my productivity, but I also see a huge problem coming up in our industry.  

The future will have a very large skills gap for newcomers to technology. They don’t have to figure out how to create an UPDATE statement to recover millions of rows of data; they can just ask AI to do it for them. They don’t have to know how to query-tune a query when AI can just tell them. When I started out as a DBA 300+ years ago, I already had a mentor with backup scripts that did a good job backing up the system. I wanted to understand how they worked, so I wrote my own scripts, expanded on his design, and improved it. This gave me understanding and problem-solving skills I would never have had if I had just asked AI to do it for me. New DBA’s, Developers, engineers, and others all need to do this so they can learn how something works.  

I’m not suggesting stopping the use of AI; in fact, it can help you to do the things that I suggest below. I just want us all to focus on some balance in using AI. AI is an amazing tool, and you shouldn't treat it like a universal hammer searching for more nails.  

1. Human Connection: I know it sounds cliché, but simply connecting with people means we have to learn new things. Interacting with people is a critical skill. Here are some specific items related to this. 
   1. Start a mentoring group in the office: Focus on solving problems without AI and how to use AI to help create lessons that you can talk and discuss. 
   2. Attend more events. Get out in the community, talk to people with real problems, and discuss how they resolved them. 
   3. Host Social discussions.  Water cooler talk is still very much needed in the office, and if you talk/work with AI all day, you still need that social interaction from time to time.  
2. Have AI explain it to you: Tell AI to write documentation for someone with no knowledge of the system to do the tasks. This gives you a chance to learn by reading the documentation or trying it yourself. 
3. Always TEST: We are starting to trust AI more and more, and we need to remember to test the solutions it creates.  Make sure you understand how it works so that you can test it. AI can write some of these tests as well, but force it to be verbose and tell you what it’s doing.  
4. Setup Controls: Don’t let AI do everything. Controls keep things safe when working with AI. Just because AI has created an app or a script for you, it doesn’t mean it has to run it and do all the other aspects of this for you. Either use the documentation it created above or figure it out yourself. Some of the best exploration and learning you can do is figuring out how something works. Review what it has done and make sure you understand.  
5. Practice makes Perfect: I recently was getting ready for a presentation and had no internet connection. I forgot the commands and scripts to run my Docker containers locally and had to get them working. I didn’t have AI to ask, so I had to read the Docker documentation to get it working. This was a great lesson in practicing these scripts instead of just having AI run them for me. It’s important, as a DBA, that you practice your recovery scripts in the same way. You never know when you will have no access to your AI 

AI is a critical tool for our future; hopefully these tips help you on your journey with AI and your career. If you are interested in attending a great upcoming event. Check out the PASS Community Summit in November. I would love to meet up and chat about your AI projects.  

Please feel free to share more tips/tricks and ideas to help improve AI in the future. 

Oh and if you want to watch the original talk here ya go.