Have you been listening to the buzz about artificial intelligence in the broader culture? 

Artificial intelligence used to seem like one of those distant technologies that is always five years down the road; however, it is already creeping into our daily lives.

Whether it’s asking Siri to text your wife or talking to Alexa about the latest score for your favorite team, artificial intelligence has already moved into our everyday world in many different ways.

Artificial intelligence can process copious amounts of data, data sets so large that no human could understand or process them quickly enough for that data to be functional and useful. Still, some folks see artificial intelligence as something to fear (but it isn’t) or that this highly technical infrastructure won’t ever impact us (but it definitely will).

The reality is that artificial intelligence is never going to replace people. People in professions like yours and mine will always be necessary for creative, emotional work.

Leading experts in artificial intelligence advise that we should think about artificial intelligence the same way we think about any tool. In the same way that a shovel didn’t replace the laborer’s need to think about where to use the shovel or how the spreadsheet didn’t replace the CFO needing to analyze the finances of an organization, artificial intelligence won’t replace the human work necessary to achieve true progress.

However, it will change the way we do our work. Below are five ways that I can see it impacting our line of work. I’d love to hear what you think! Leave a comment below about how you think artificial intelligence might impact the way we do what we do.

Processing your email

Remember when email was new and fun?

I still remember those days at my university’s computer lab sending emails to my then-girlfriend. It felt like magic that my words somehow traveled all the way from my school to her school in no time at all. 

Despite texting, Zooming, and Facetiming, email continues to be a vitally important communication trend. In fact, no other tool that the internet has brought us is really as effective in reaching people and leveraging change. It will be a long time before email becomes obsolete.

There will be a day where artificial intelligence will read all our emails for us and compress them down to the two or three messages that really require our attention and action. In fact, we’re already seeing some of this in the way Gmail and other services organize our emails for us by figuring out those that are of vital importance and tagging or filing them in a way that makes it easy for us to process them.

Long-term, we’ll continually gain more clarity on which emails we need to process more quickly, and our artificial intelligence bots will let us know immediately if there’s something incredibly pressing. We’ll keep everything else for the times of day when we have more time to review all our emails.

[Sidebar: You should not be checking your email constantly. Set aside time during the day to sit down and drive your inbox to zero every single time. But that’s another blog post.]

Pastoral chatbots

Okay, go with me on this one. Some people are already talking to Siri in a way they shouldn’t (i.e., declaring their love for her. Good thing the folks in Cupertino have programmed her to be shy and push away any potential suitors.) That being said, we’ve already seen the rise of increasingly intelligent chatbots. Eventually,