Use AI, but don’t lose you

A and I. Two letters that are on everyone’s lips these days. Artificial intelligence, we are told, is the greatest opportunity in the history of humankind. It will free us all from drudge work and lead to an unprecedented productivity boom. Artificial intelligence, we are also told, is the greatest threat to the future of humanity. It will take over most jobs on earth, and create a class of useless humans.

Not coincidentally, what we are told has led to multi-trillion-dollar valuations for the companies leading the AI game. If your instincts are telling you to take all this hype with many packets of salt, trust them.

What is not in doubt, however, is that AI is a massively useful everyday tool for all of us. 

Are you doing all this? Ask it to pull threads together when you’re researching. Turn a tangle of notes into a clear outline. Rewrite clunky sentences until they breathe. Counter-check claims against sources. Simplify jargon. Summarize a podcast. Propose counter-arguments so you don’t fall for your own story.

Across professions, AI is doing the heavy lifting. Lawyers have it analyse the other side’s complex contracts in seconds. Doctors use it to transcribe notes and digitise immediately. Teachers build creative lesson plans and rubrics. They’re all recapturing precious hours—delegating the drudge, keeping the decisions. The machine lifts; the human decides. 

But is that what’s actually happening?

I fear not. I suspect most people are using AI to simply reduce or get rid of many tasks, not as a co-intelligence that increases their bandwidth and becomes their very smart, very useful assistant. If used properly, AI could act like a quiet pit crew for your thinking. 

But most people will probably hand over the steering to the machine, too. They will copy and paste its outputs verbatim. They will accept its citations without any further checking. They will delegate judgement as well as drudge. And then they will fume and blame the machine when when they sit atop a sloppy mess.

As I have found, the real gold in AI is in using it with great discernment. Make it surface arguments you wouldn’t see; make it argue back; make it cite its sources. Ask to see its workings. Use it to slash the time to first draft; then spend the saved time on thinking about the higher stuff: context and consequences. And before anything leaves your desk, verify the facts, add the judgement, own the decision. 

That’s exactly what I’m doing in writing this piece.

Sadly, my fear is that most people—individuals as well as organisational leaders—will take the lazy option. This thing is good enough—let’s use it indiscriminately and save all that time! Let’s unleash it on our customers and reduce headcount! Let’s stop hiring young people because we no longer need to! Let’s not worry about guardrails and regulation right now—we’re in the middle of a hype cycle and valuations must keep rocketing!

That’s the lesson of human history: we always overdo it before we find balance. We only learn after we burn.

And so I expect the next few years to be very problematic. Individuals will forego all creativity and imagination and let the machine do everything. Their bosses will then lay them off and stop hiring smart young things to replace them. Most work outputs will start looking near-identical. We will have a jobs crisis and a mediocrity crisis. Only then will tough corrections commence.

Meanwhile, everything I’ve just written above is a huge opportunity for the smart folks. Use AI to stand out from the crowd, not sink into it. Use it to release you to do the higher-order work, not merely avoid the repetitive stuff. That way you can be the one who rides the chaos.

And leaders? Set a few clear rules. Human sign-off. Random spot checks. Clear attribution rules. No auto-send. Two big policies: critique your own work—don’t just be prompt-happy. And keep hiring juniors—AI-native, savvy operators who bring fresh blood—and pair them with seasoned hands.

AI will be in the room either way. What we do with it is a choice; we don’t have to choose unthinking, reckless adoption.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

Don’t abdicate—orchestrate. Treat AI as assistant, not author.

 

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