Greetings Reader

Many times over the summer holidays, I threw burritos at my daughter and husband.

Not real ones, obviously. That would be gross.

I threw the foam ones from Throw Throw Burrito.

This masterpiece of a game comes via the Exploding Kittens empire.

You might have heard of Exploding Kittens. It started as a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign by game designer Elan Lee and The Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman. It went on to raise nearly $9 million in 30 days and has now spawned 50+ games in just ten years.

I am obsessed with this company. So late last year, I invited co-founder Elan Lee to come on How I Work to talk about how he uses AI to think creatively.

It turns out that he has a daily morning ritual: he takes his AI for a walk. But this isn’t your average AI stroll. Elan created a GPT that interviews him - not to suggest ideas, but to draw out his own creative sparks.

In a world of AI slop (robotic emails, mediocre first drafts, bland strategy docs, etc) the smartest people I know aren’t outsourcing their thinking. They are using AI to augment it.

Since hearing Elan's story, I was motivated to create my own AI brainstorming buddy. So last week, I turned to Neo Aplin (Inventium.ai’s head of AI) and we built (and spent hours testing) a Brainstorm Buddy.

It doesn’t spoon-feed ideas. Instead, it helps tease them out of the human.

The other day, for example, I had a client grappling with AI adoption. They’d nailed the basics but needed creative ways to take it further. So, I fired up my AI sidekick. I had already spent an hour or so using my human brain (how novel!) to problem solve, and then I went for a walk with my AI Brainstorm Buddy. It helped me narrow in on the problem I was trying to solve and then guided through expanding out and stress-testing the ideas I'd already been thinking about. Tomorrow, I'll be meeting with this client to get into the details around prototyping this cool new idea. It involves Zombies. Fun.

See you next week.

Cheers

Amantha