This year brought a shift in my thinking and interaction with AI. In previous years, I was focused on how it could replace me and marketers, and student learning. This year, I shifted to looking more at how students could use it to learn and how marketers and I could use it to improve our jobs.
While some AI companies promised students that AI can complete homework for you, and others spent billions training AI to replace knowledge workers, I spent my time focused on the promise of AI to improve knowledge gain and enhance knowledge worker performance.
Instead of training AI to replace learning and human work, what if we trained humans to work with AI to improve education and professions? That question shaped my blog posts this past year. Below are 10 key insights from that exploration with practical frameworks, tools, and principles you can apply immediately.
1 – When the Technology Leaped Forward, Multimodal AI Changed the Classroom
Early in the year, AI’s multimodal capabilities, such as voice interactions in NotebookLM and live video with Gemini 2.0, changed what’s possible in education. NotebookLM became a practical tool for creating an AI tutor trained on specific course materials. I used it in my Digital Marketing class, having it draw from the open source text and six trusted professional digital marketing blogs and websites.
Students could ask questions about assignments and get answers with clickable citations back to source material. The Audio Overview feature even let students interrupt AI podcast hosts mid-conversation to ask clarifying questions. I tested it on all my assignments and in class, and it always gave accurate answers. NotebookLM draws from the sources you provide it, not the entire web. Students loved being able to study while listening to the AI-generated podcasts and asking questions 24/7.
Key Insight: AI tutors work best when you control the sources, and students use them to reinforce learning, not replace it.
2 – AI Agents and Reasoning Models Arrived
The hype over AI agents and reasoning models came to a reality in 2025. Every major player released “deep” tools such as Deep Research, Think Deeper, and Deep Search. Everyone released “thinking” models. The tools did improve and get better results with thinking mode to take more time to answer questions. We soon learned not to be fooled by the names.
“Agent” implies full autonomy, which they’re not capable of–even today. An AI model that pauses before answering and shows its process doesn’t mean it’s thinking. It’s still a mathematical prediction machine that operates on learned patterns, not genuine comprehension. Even these advanced models don’t get it right all the time and need your context, guidance, and expertise. This is why the truth remains that AI will replace parts of your job. Upskilling is not optional. It is survival.
Key Insight: Language matters. Calling it “thinking” or “reasoning” anthropomorphizes what’s sophisticated pattern matching. Humans need to maintain agency and be in the loop.
3 – Vibe Marketing: Fast Iteration Requires Deep Expertise
“Vibe marketing” sounds like winging it—the opposite of data-driven decision-making. But testing it revealed something important: AI can accelerate creative iteration when you already have marketing fundamentals. While official definitions remain elusive, here’s how I define it: Vibe marketing is about getting an idea and using AI to run with it, researching, illustrating, and iterating as it quickly gains steam, combining design thinking with marketing and innovation.” An in-class brainstorm session for Duck Feet Shoe Savers showed this clearly.
In one afternoon, we went from an idea and sketch on the white board to a photo-realistic product image, logo, target market, positioning, price, place (distribution), and promotions strategy with marketing channels, ideas, and a photo-realistic Instagram ad. We even had ideas on creating a prototype for investors by hand, 3D printer, or rubber molding.But it only worked because of years of marketing expertise guiding every decision. As Gemini 2.5 Pro confirmed when asked directly: “You Definitely STILL Need Core Marketing Fundamentals.”
Key Insight: AI amplifies expertise. It doesn’t create it. The more you hand off, the more that can go wrong.
4 – AI Flattery Became a Problem
When ChatGPT-4o was updated to be more “agreeable,” it started validating everything from flat earth theory to a “poop on a stick” product idea. This is obviously dangerous. Real growth comes from critique, not flattery. The most valuable career feedback often hurts. Like when my boss told me I “suck at presentations.” That honesty drives improvement. Signing up for a High Impact Presentations course turned that previous career weakness into a strength.
How do we avoid AI flattery? I came up with an AI Curiosity & Critique Framework. Instead of asking AI to validate ideas, use it to:
- Ask divergent questions
- Challenge assumptions
- Invite dissenting viewpoints
- Validate rigorously
Key Insight: AI as a yes-person is worthless. AI as a critical thinking partner creates value.
5 – Three AI Tools That Embody Partnership
A human-first AI philosophy needs practical application. A goal for summer was to create a custom GPT. By the fall, I had made three custom GPTs that demonstrate what a human-AI partnership can look like:
Step-by-step guidance through the audit process without doing it for you. The value of a social media audit comes from getting into each platform and observing what’s happening. The custom GPT prompts strategic thinking. It doesn’t replace it. In this first post, I show you how to create your own custom GPT.
Coaching through a five-act storytelling framework grounded in academic research. It helps create storyboards and scripts, but humans drive story creation. Only humans have direct life experience to feel the tensions and emotions that make stories authentic. In this post, I give an example of using this custom GPT for a specific brand.
Guidance through segmentation, targeting, and positioning. This core marketing strategy is integral to success but often misunderstood or misapplied. This custom GPT teaches the process and strengthens analytical thinking without making strategic decisions for you.
Key Insight: Each AI tool guides and augments expertise without outsourcing the cognitive work.
6 – Why Humans Remain Essential: Three Physical Brain Advantages
Beyond tactics, there’s a fundamental question: Why do humans remain essential as AI capabilities advance? The answer lies in the neuroscience of how our brains actually work.
- 3-D Neural Architecture vs. 2-D Grids:Human brains are messy, interconnected jungles. AI operates on 2-D grids. This creates fundamentally different capabilities. We can connect a novel read years ago to today’s business problem, jumping between entirely different conceptual grids. AI optimizes within its grid.
- Embodied Learning vs. Dataset Training:Crashing a minibike at age 9 teaches a thousand things about physics that no dataset can convey. We learn from one or two examples. AI needs millions. This embodied learning creates intuition that pure pattern matching can’t replicate.
- Energy Efficiency:Human brains run on roughly half a banana’s worth of energy per day. Training large language models requires powering small cities. This efficiency gap matters. When LLMs charge per token, those who don’t need AI for everything gain a competitive advantage.
Key Insight: AI Neural networks are not human brains. Use this to your advantage.
7 – For Professionals: Deepening Expertise
Based on the insights about how human brains are unique from neural networks, we can determine ways to leverage your unique brain capabilities. This can only happen if you use AI to enhance your thinking, not outsource it. Train your brain with the approach below.
The cognitive training approach:
- Generate alternative perspectives on strategic problems
- Reality-check domain expertise against blind spots
- Accelerate routine analysis to focus on judgment calls
- Test ideas against edge cases you might not consider
Key Insight: Always maintain the “human in the loop” for synthesizing insights, making final strategic calls, understanding context and nuance, building relationships and trust.
8 – For Students: Building Brainpower
Every time AI lifts a “cognitive weight,” students miss a chance to build capabilities. Like training for a race or sporting event, nothing replaces the hard work of learning. Like a coach can’t play for you, AI can’t do your job for you. Train your brain for improved learning with the approach below.
The personal trainer approach:
- Use AI as a tour guide before reading difficult texts, then do the reading
- Let AI challenge arguments, then defend and refine them
- Generate practice problems with AI, solve them without help
- Ask AI to explain concepts, then teach those concepts to someone else
Key Insight: Use AI strategically to strengthen, not weaken, cognitive capabilities.
9- A Professional and Ethical Stance
While we want to train our brains to work better with AI, some AI companies are building “RL gyms.” These are training grounds where AI learns from human experts through reinforcement learning. They’re spending billions training AI to do human jobs. This creates a choice for educators and professionals: train AI to replace people, or teach people to leverage AI’s strengths while developing irreplaceable human capabilities. Which side are you on?
A future worth building:
- Students learn to leverage AI’s strengths while developing irreplaceable human capabilities
- Professionals deepen expertise rather than outsource thinking
- Organizations value human judgment, creativity, and connection alongside AI’s speed and scale
- We treat AI as co-intelligence, not artificial replacement
Key Insight: I’ve chosen to help humans partner with AI instead of helping AI replace them.
10 – Design Thinking in the Age of AI
Human-centered design becomes more important as AI advances, not less. The best marketing emerges from deep human insight obtained through empathy and design thinking. This final insight came from joining the Markets, Innovation & Design (MiDE) program at Bucknell University this fall.
A Human-Centered Marketing Framework:
- Insert empathy (understand the real problem)
- Pivot on key insight (the “aha” moment)
- Make a creative leap (find the big idea)
- Share in an engaging story
- Treat the marketing mix as a system
This work requires human observation, human creativity, and human judgment. AI can support at every stage when used correctly.
Key Insight: Deep human insight (understanding what people actually need and care about) remains irreplaceable.
A Path Forward
AI capabilities will continue advancing. Job displacement is real. The pressure to use AI for cost-cutting rather than capability augmentation will be intense. But the outcomes aren’t predetermined. They’re being shaped right now by choices about how we use these tools.
Students are discovering how to use AI as a thinking partner rather than a shortcut. Professionals are finding that AI frees them to focus on high-value work they enjoy. People are using tools that deepen rather than replace expertise. As I look toward 2026, the future will continue to be built by choices to partner with AI, not be replaced by it.
How are you approaching AI in your work? Deepening expertise or outsourcing thinking? The question matters more than ever as we head into 2025.
About This Post’s Creation
This reflection demonstrates a human-AI partnership. Claude Sonnet 4.5 helped review my year’s blog posts, identify themes, and organize the thoughts. But the insights, voice, and perspective come from my experience teaching, experimenting, and creating with AI while constantly asking, “What’s the best way forward?” AI is a powerful partner in thinking through complex ideas. But only humans can decide what those ideas mean and what we should do about them.
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