Guy Kawasaki was one of Apple’s first supporters, popularizing the idea of “secular evangelism” with his support for the early Macintosh computer. Today Kawasaki is a speaker, writer and chief evangelist for the graphic design company Canva.
On Feb. 12, he’ll be the keynote speaker at the President’s Speaker series, hosted in the World Theatre. In the lead-up to his talk, the Lutrinae asked him about artificial intelligence (AI), tips for students entering the workforce and more.
Q: For students hoping to enter the tech workforce or just the workforce in general in the next five years, what kind of advice would you have for them?
A: My first piece of advice is to embrace artificial intelligence. I think artificial intelligence is the biggest game changer I have encountered in my entire career. I tell my own kids [that] soon there’s going to be two kinds of people. There are going to be people who can use AI and people who are going to struggle. It’s like if you can’t use the internet today, you are at a disadvantage, right? I think AI will be absolutely the same kind of thing.
Q: Do you see any parallels in AI development with what you did at Apple as chief evangelist?
A: There are more differences than there are similarities. When I was an evangelist for Macintosh, it was dividing up the pie, right? Which operating system do you want to use? It was Apple versus Microsoft, etc. There’s a lot of competition in AI, but it’s not exactly like that. I use Claude, Chat GPT – I use four or five different things. It’s not like switching operating systems on a computer.
Q: What’s one way that students, academics or professionals can adapt to AI?
A: As [a] student, I’ve got to believe you can utilize AI. I’m not at a 50,000-foot level, I’m at a maybe 2,500-foot level and as a writer, I use AI to be a research assistant, as a grammar checker, a dictionary and a thesaurus. I’m not talking about these kinds of futuristic visionary things; I’m talking about your day-to-day activities. In drafting emails and drafting reports, you know drafting papers. So just get on that practical bandwagon.
(Author’s Note: I use AI in my day-to-day workflow, including making a transcript of this very interview using Microsoft 365’s AI tool.)
Q: The last question is from our editor-in-chief. Were you surprised at all by the emergence of tech leaders like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg onto the political stage?
A: I am absolutely stunned, and I am absolutely disgusted.