Lesson 217 · 2 min
Using AI without losing your skills
Decide which skills you want to keep sharp, do the first attempt yourself for those, and use AI to check and improve your work.
If AI writes every email and every analysis, you may slowly lose the ability to do them yourself. Researchers have started to study this, and it matches common sense: skills you never use get weaker.
The answer is to choose. For tasks you do not care to master, like formatting a table, let AI do it. For skills that make you valuable, like writing a clear argument or reading a balance sheet, try first and then ask AI for feedback.
Another habit: before you read the AI's answer, guess what it will say. Afterwards, ask why it chose its approach. That keeps your brain in the loop.
Check in every few months. Can you still do the core parts of your job without AI if the tool is down? If not, practise them.
Do it now
List your keep-sharp skills
- 1. Write three skills that make you good at your job.
- 2. For one of them, do the next task yourself before asking AI.
- 3. Use the prompt below to get feedback on your attempt.
I did this task myself first, to practise. Task: [TASK]. My attempt: [PASTE]. Do not rewrite it. Instead, tell me the 3 most important things to improve, explain why, and give me one exercise to practise the weakest part.
Quick check
Keep going
Next →Which tasks AI takes firstWords from this lesson
- Automation bias
- Our habit of trusting a machine's answer too readily, even when our own judgement or other evidence says otherwise.
- Human in the loop
- Designing a process so a person reviews or approves the AI's work before it has real consequences.
- AI literacy
- Knowing enough about how AI works to use it well, spot its mistakes and decide when not to use it.