Of Course It's AI

Every presentation/document/post/email I write gets the same spoken or unspoken reaction from someone in the room: Did AI write that?

Yes, I use AI, and you should too. No, this is what I want to say and the conclusion is my own.

Everyone who is my age had a elementary school math teacher tell them they would not always have a calculator with them. She was wrong about calculators, but she was right about something more important: the tool does not replace thinking and comprehension. It is supposed to accelerate it. Every generation gets a new version of this argument. Calculators. Google (I also grew up in "The Internet is not allowed as a source" generation). Now AI. The people who figure out how to use the tool well pull ahead. The people who let the tool do the thinking for them plateau.

I use AI every day. I also follow a few rules that keep the work mine and ensure I am not building my own crutches.

The idea has to come from me or at least the interest in the idea. AI does not generate my opinions. I bring a point of view to every conversation and ask AI to check it for bias, fill in gaps, and tell me where I might be wrong. "I saw this on , this could be great for , do some research and tell me all you can about it. The rules are built into my agents. Just this morning, my research agent told me, "It's an ok idea, probably not something that moves you closer to your goals". That is GOLD. It challenges my assumptions without replacing them. The output is still my conclusion, arrived at with better information. What it did was allow me to consume information faster while also providing a check that I may be drifting from my focus.

It has to be something I actually want to talk about or learn. I do not ask AI to generate topics. Alexa and Siri were fine for that. The subject comes from something I saw in a client conversation, a quick screenshot of something someone said that grabbed my attention, a pattern I keep running into, one of the many things I've been meaning to "get around to", etc. If I am not interested in the topic, no amount of polish makes it worth reading or writing about.

I start with my conclusion. Before I write anything, I know what I want to say and why. The goal is clear before the first word goes down. AI helps me get there faster and more clearly, but the destination was already mine.

The same principle applies to learning. I will see something in a meeting, a screenshot of a product, a diagram on a whiteboard, and I want to know more about it immediately. I send it to AI and say exactly this: "Add it to my task list to learn more about this". My "team" gets to work. I get a task added to my queue and the task is filled with research on the topics, possible conclusions, and links to more information. That is the calculator argument in practice. The tool did not tell me what to be curious about. It just removed the friction between the question and the knowledge I am looking for. Possibly the most overlooked part is that I actually get around to it. I can't count how many photos of slides from conferences are probably sitting in my iCloud that I never got around to looking at again. This has been a measurable step in my follow through on those tasks. Measurable because they have to be completed or dismissed off my task list.

The thing that will separate people in the next few years is not whether they use AI. Everyone will use AI. The differentiator is whether they bring something to the conversation. I believe you have to make it real. It's not about tricking AI screening tools, its about real world stories and being genuine. The thing that will separate people is how they use it. AI makes the execution of your ideas more accessible than ever. I am excited to see how people make it happen.