It's years and years since I wrote the blog on FOMO. It really came to light in the early stages of the social media explosion, where people started to compare everything they did with everyone else, with everybody's perfect life against their not-so-perfect life, and so, the industrial ‘fear of missing out’ epidemic emerged.
As the technology got better, more efficient and more embedded, as we spent more time doomscrolling, the FOMO got greater and greater, and society started to break in half.
Then we gave the phones to our children, younger and younger, so they could experience FOMO just at exactly the right amount of time when they really didn't need to be doing that, because it created such behavioural patterns that we couldn't untie, or undo and it's probably set us back in a way that we can never ever repair.
And then they built the nuclear reactors to power AI, and then they stacked the chips on top of one another, and then we had the opportunity to turbocharge our FOMO in a way that's almost unimaginable.
There is not a day that goes past now where someone doesn't talk to me about an AI solution that I could use or present to me an AI opportunity that I could have or make me feel like I'm entirely missing out because I haven't totally embedded some robotic workforce into the practice who can allow me to make an unlimited amount of money and sit on a boat in the harbour in Monaco, just checking my bank balance every so often.
It was never going to get better, but the AI FOMO, the technological fear of missing out, is quite extraordinary.
Every publication that you pick up has an AI subtext or subculture related to it.
One of my friends, Michael Bornstein, is one of the experts in AI for dental imaging, for example, and the reporting of dental X-rays and imaging. Everywhere across medicine and dentistry, models are trying to be introduced before anyone else (they call it first-mover advantage in business).
Obviously, now Chat-GPT 5 has been released, and the things that we could possibly do with this seem to be potentially extraordinary.
And so, what do we do with this now, with all of this FOMO and all of this expanding technology?
Do we sit back from our normal jobs and dedicate our time to the AI world, hoping that it will fix a lot of problems that we had before and make us more effective and efficient?
Do we have the capacity for this? I suspect not.
What small business enterprise has the opportunity to implement AI, having done a thorough investigation of the marketplace and looking at the potential opportunities and disadvantages of any isolation?
What small business has the opportunity to try to figure out how one thing will kick out another thing, and some improvements that we make here might be devastating over there?
What areas do you use it in?
Tom (our brilliant marketing director) has used AI since Chat-GPT was launched and certainly integrated it into our marketing and our academy business in practice in a way that has made efficiencies, reductions, and reliance on other methods, really quite cool and spectacular. We sat yesterday to look at GPT-5 and the agent function of GPT-5, which will now ‘scrape’ websites at your request in order to find out, well, anything you want really.
So, yesterday we wrote a marketing plan to attack the dental implant market in Nottinghamshire. We directed and counter-directed the GPT-5 agent mode to provide this plan for us to improve it and to outline what we could do. Bearing in mind, though, I did this with an expert in digital marketing, someone who has relatively recently secured their first class degree and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
It was clear that the plan had some good parts, but it also had some holes in the things we had, along with some complete garbage that was of no meaning or worth. That will be the nature of things, certainly, at the moment before it gets better and better (and it will).
Right now, though, the human insight and knowledge that is required is huge, and so still the humanity, the insight, the creativity, that's ours, and it's not going anywhere soon.
Blog Post Number - 4263
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