When I started my first A/E/C marketing job several years ago, the colleague who onboarded me presented a challenge on my first day.
“Twenty photos of 20 of our most important projects—I’ll quiz you on these at the end of the week.”
When I got 19/20 correct come Friday, he was surprised—but I wasn’t.
I don’t have a “photographic memory,” but my mind has always had an affinity for processing this sort of information.
For whatever reason, my brain has a database tendency—I process a lot of raw data into my long-term memory. I recall a broader pool of historical project data better than anyone else at my firm, and I’ve been there just shy of five years.
The talent (it’s not a skill), though, has an expiration date.
Right now, this talent for digesting rote project information still accrues value for me. Being on parental leave, I called my colleague to see how things were going in my absence. The one question that came up?
“Do you remember which proposals had responses to that set of questions?”
As a matter of fact, I did.
But the moment that large language model chatbots like ChatGPT make their way into our work world, you won’t need to ask me anymore. The AI will know!
Taylor Coe 