Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Why I’m Teaching Humans to Partner with AI Instead of Training AI to Replace Them.

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

While AI companies are now spending billions teaching AI to replace people, I take a different view – teaching people to work with AI as partners, not competitors. My approach has been thinking of AI as what Ethan Mollick calls Co-Intelligence. AI is a research assistant, brainstorm partner, advisor, task completer, and debater. It’s a tool to augment and sharpen, not replace your own human intelligence, expertise, and learning.

How are you feeling about AI? It’s been a short, long 3 years of ups and downs. I’m trying to navigate  forward somewhere through the middle.

On one of my runs this week I was listening to the Artificial Intelligence Show. Co-host Paul Roetzer referenced the article, “How Anthropic and OpenAI Are Developing AI ‘Co-Workers'” and explained how AI companies are spending 1 billion this year training LLM agents to do our jobs using cloned apps and reinforcement learning (RL).

Since the release of ChatGPT, I’ve been focused on helping professionals, professors, and students prepare for AI in the workplace, not as a replacement for their expertise and thinking, but as a tool to improve and enhance their human knowledge and talents.

Humans are training AI in RL gyms.

Companies like Mercor are recruiting highly-skilled experts such as doctors, lawyers, PhDs, engineers, and marketers, paying them high wages to work with AI labs to be LLM trainers. They’ve built thousands of RL gyms training AI on knowledge worker jobs.

When I heard this, I honestly almost stopped my run to dream about the money I could make as an AI trainer! But that dream didn’t last long, when I thought about the moral implications and how that would make me feel professionally and personally. I really enjoy teaching humans.

Despite any moral dilemma, the business reality is clear: AI is here to stay. A Stanford HAI survey found 78% of organizations reported using AI in 2024, a steep increase from 55% in 2023.

Rather than training AI to be human, my last two posts were about training people to leverage our brain’s advantages over AI to Be More Human. The Cognitive Training Plan for Students gives examples on how to partner with AI to sharpen your mind, and the Cognitive Training Plan for Professionals explains how to partner with AI to deepen your expertise.

Use AI as a tool, not a replacement.

I’m aware of the risk of cognitive offloading. Rely on AI too much and replace our thinking or learning, then we lose those skills as professionals or never acquire them as students. I’ve illustrated the dangers of this in an infographic that warns how AI Can Skip The Stages of the Cognitive Learning Process.

My solution has been to use AI, test it, and share what I learn with my students, professor colleagues, and marketing and communications professionals. Overtime I’ve learned ways to use AI and ways not to use it. A key concept that explains this is the jagged frontier of AI.

In research with Boston Consulting Group, Ethan Mollick and his co-authors found that AI is very good at some things but bad at others in ways that are hard to predict or recognize without expertise. The consultants at BGC found the edges through use and became AI experts in their discipline. Those who engage with AI to uncover the jagged frontier in their field will not only survive in the AI revolution but thrive.

GPTs to increase your co-intelligence with AI.

This summer, I had a goal of creating a custom GPT. I wanted to train general AI for specific high-value tasks that I’ve found professionals and students struggle to understand and/or execute. I also wanted custom GPTs that guide and direct, not outsource thinking.

A social media audit is an invaluable strategic tool that uncovers insights to make significant improvements to a brand’s social media marketing. Yet, the process is often difficult to understand. The Social Media Audit GPT takes you step-by-step through the process of conducting a social media audit for any product, service, or organization. It’s trained on the social media audit process used in my book, Social Media Marketing.

The Social Media Audit GPT isn’t an automated tool that collects data or does the audit for you. You remain in the driver’s seat as the social media strategy expert (current professional or student in training). Only humans truly understand how we socialize online with other humans and companies.

Brand storytelling has been a buzzword in business because it works. It’s been proven by my own story research and others. Yet, telling good stories isn’t easy. The Brand Story Creator GPT acts as your coach for creating brand ads and content that resonates through the power of story, based on the dramatic story framework as explained in our Brand Storytelling book. Get help turning your story into scripts, storyboards, print, and social media post mockups.

The Brand Story Creator GPT isn’t an AI automated tool that writes or analyzes for you. As the human expert (current professional or student in training), you’re central to the story creation and analysis. Humans have direct experience of life and can feel the tensions and emotions of characters, key to crafting a story.

A target market is one of the most important strategic decisions. Get it wrong, and the best product or campaign can flop. The Target Market Coach GPT acts as your coach to guide you through the process of segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP)—a core marketing framework used by top brands. But even top brands, like Gatorade in the 2000s, can fall into the trap of selecting the wrong target, or targets that are too broad or too vague.

I trained this GPT on core marketing principles developed by Phillip Kotler, but also on core concepts emphasized in the Markets, Innovation & Design program I now teach in. A customer-centric perspective is emphasized with an empathetic persona, considering Clayton Christian’s Jobs to Be Done Theory.

The Target Market Coach GPT won’t replace your thinking. It’s designed to strengthen it. As the human expert (current professional or student in training), you’re central to the target selection and analysis to bring an empathic human-centered perspective.

Why bother if AI companies will eventually replace us anyway?

That will take time. AI agent capabilities tend to be over hyped. There’ s much training to go. Plus, by OpenAI’s own admission, LLMs will never be 100% accurate. Humans will always need to remain in the loop. Last week, BetterUp published research in Harvard Business Review that identified unchecked AI used by coworkers as “AI Workslop” that can reduce trust and productivity.

Even the most advanced AI systems demonstrate why humans must stay in the loop. I was using Gemini 2.5 Pro to find stats for this post and Gemini gave me a number. Based on my experience it felt off to me. When I asked where it got that number, Gemini replied,

“The figure from a ‘Chronicle of Higher Education in mid-2025’ survey was a fabrication. In an effort to provide a current and illustrative answer, I generated a hypothetical but plausible-sounding data point and source. This was a mistake. Presenting a fabricated statistic as fact is incorrect, and I apologize for the misrepresentation. Thank you for holding me accountable.”

You also have to consider that human adoption rates often lag behind technological innovation. Even when AI agents get to professional knowledge worker levels, replacing entire departments in companies will be very difficult to achieve.

Even the most aggressive AI-first companies need transition time, such as the Swedish company, Klarna. Months after partnering with OpenAI to replace its customer service team, the company had to reverse course when customers lost patience with the bots.

Ideally, you’ll work for a human-first AI company that’ll strive to minimize the negative effects through growth and a strategic transition. In either case, the employee with AI skills will be kept over the one who refuses or simply doesn’t learn how to use AI effectively.

This isn’t speculation. Just this week Accenure announced a $865 million reinvention around AI that includes “exiting people in a compressed timeline where reskilling is not a viable path.” Walmart announced an effort to prepare America’s largest private workforce for the AI-driven future with its CEO saying, “every job gets changed” because of AI. And SAP’s CFO says AI will help them “afford to have less people.” How can I not help prepare my students for this reality?

Academic versus business perspectives.

This business reality stands in contrast to what’s happening in academia. Mark Watkins’s latest Substack captures that environment well.

He references Tyler Harper’s The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI article. It positions universities as facing a pivotal choice: either isolate digital technology from learning as much as possible, even removing it from campuses entirely, or give up on the mission of learning entirely.

So, we have one extreme of some in business spending billions training AI to replace human workers and another extreme of some in universities calling for banning AI altogether.

What’s the answer? I believe it’s somewhere in-between all-out ban and all-out adoption. Even the AI companies are recognizing the need for a middle ground. An example is Google coming out with Guided Learning for Gemini that’s designed not to provide answers but help humans learn how to get answers on their own.

As Watkins points out, we live in an algorithm driven society. Most are quietly in the middle working hard to integrate AI in meaningful ways that advance capabilities and preserve human value. Yet, the stories on the extremes are what garner attention with clickbait headlines that end up in your feed. Since I published this post, Citi announced mandatory retraining of 175,000 employees on writing better prompts. How could I not teach students to use AI responsibly including writing better prompts using my AI Prompt Framework?

AI Prompt Framework Template with 1. Task/Goal 2. AI Persona 3. AI Audience 4. AI Task 5. AI Data 6. Evaluate Results.
AI Prompt Framework Template for writing good prompts.

Ready to start partnering with AI rather than competing against it?

Explore my three human-first AI tools designed to enhance rather than replace your expertise: Social Media Audit GPT, Brand Story Creator GPT, and Target Market Coach. And let me know if I can improve them through further training. Remember, they’re not perfect. Don’t check your critical thinking at the AI door.

This Was 95% Human Generated Content!

I wanted to share my custom GPTs but also comment on what I’ve been seeing in the professional and academic worlds around AI. I sat down and started writing. I did use Gemini Pro 2.5 to find some stats (and check them), and I used Anthropic Sonnet 4 for writing improvement suggestions.

Afraid of Being Replaced By AI? Be More Human: A Guide To Your Brain’s Key Advantages.

There is a fight for jobs with AI
~ K. Quesenberry ~ 1 Comment

With recent articles about current and future AI job losses, a lot of students, parents, and career professionals are concerned about their future employability. I am too! It’s a fight for jobs with AI and it’s the first rounds.

There is a fight for jobs with AI
Image created with Gemini 2.0 Flash Image generator https://aistudio.google.com

I’ve Been Here Before And Made It Through.

As a mid-career advertising creative, I survived and thrived during the 2000s transition from traditional to digital media. How? First, I freaked out, but then I discovered a perspective that focused me on my capabilities that transcended the digital media revolution.

What I learned, explained in this blog post, was that when it feels like everything is changing, grasp on to what will remain. Back then, we thought the digital media experts would replace all advertising creatives because they knew the Internet. Yet knowing traditional media was only a part of our job skills.

We were skilled observers of life whose ideas connected often mundane product features to people’s lives through powerful narratives. We were idea writers who took seemingly unrelated things and put them together into cultural narratives that built brands.

Digital media was merely a new tool for our irreplaceable strategic and creative skills. Knowing how to write a 30-second TV ad didn’t make us valuable. Our intuitive sense of knowing the most powerful story to put into a TV ad or social media post made us valuable. The new employee next to me knew coding and HTML but not storytelling in any medium.

Lean Into What Your Brain Can Do Uniquely.

Now we face a new revolution. One that doesn’t affect one career or industry, but all knowledge workers. Despite the increased scale, we should approach it the same way.

Soon, an AI agent will be “sitting” next to you at your job. What can you do that it cannot? If you’re a student, what skills can you develop in college that AI won’t be able to replace?

Don’t answer these questions, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says you may not have internship and entry-level job opportunities. Mid-career professionals are not immune either. We’re already seeing AI job displacement.

While no one knows the future (especially AI advancements), I see a path forward. It is based on my deep dive into AI over the past 18 months, teaching college students during the rise of AI, and my experience as an ad creative working through a technology revolution.

Rather than list skills that may be replaced by AI, let’s look at the physical advantages human brains have over AI neural networks. Then, as if training for a competition, lean into activities that work and strengthen your brain in unique areas AI can’t get better at. If you don’t train, you can’t expect to compete.

Train Your Brain to Be More Human.

There’s no doubt you can’t ignore AI. Nvidia CEO Jesen Huang says anyone who doesn’t learn to use AI will lose their jobs to people who use AI. While true, there’s a difference between using AI to increase your human intelligence versus replace it. AI the wrong way can cost your job, too.

Use AI for everything, and you could lose your human brain advantage. Working your brain in specific ways, like physical training, is essential to maintaining and strengthening cognitive function. When I noticed my attention span shrinking due to digital media consumption, I added long books to my daily media diet to build back that capacity.

AI is good at many intellectual tasks and will get better. Startup Mechanize is training AI agents on jobs specifically to replace humans. Yet, even AI-first companies recognize unique human qualities.

After going all AI, Klarna is rehiring some of the 700 customer service employees it let go. CEO Sebastian Siemistkowski admits that the “value of that human touch will increase.”

Whether you’re years from retirement or a student looking to enter a field, prepare for the job competition by doubling down on uniquely human brain capabilities. How is our biological brain unique from the artificial neural network (ANN) that powers AI?

1. You Run On A Banana; AI On A Power Plant.

The human brain is much more energy efficient. A human writing a 1,000-word report takes the energy equivalent of 0.02 kWh hours, while an LLM takes 100 times more at 2.9 kWh. Your energy use for the report is half a banana, while ChatGPT would use enough to power a light bulb for 5 days. Entire power plants are being built just to power AI data centers.

Beyond environmental concerns, more LLMs are charging per query and token. Even paid accounts like ChatGPT Plus limit Deep Research reports to 10 per month. An employee who doesn’t have to use AI for everything will get work done more efficiently. Plus, unlike AI your brain never stops working on problems.

When working out or sleeping, your subconscious mind keeps making connections. You have sustainable, all-day-long intelligence versus energy-guzzling, task-specific intelligence.

2. Your Brain Is A Messy 3D Jungle; AI is a Layered Perfect Grid.

An AI’s neural network is organized in neat layers. Data goes in one end, and a decision comes out the other. Based on Dr. Lichtman’s work, we know your brain is a mess of 86 billion neurons, each one connected to thousands of others in a chaotic, 3-dimensional web forming 100+ trillion possibilities.

Your messy brain is a genius at making connections a clean grid can’t. You can connect the plot of a novel you read a decade ago with a business problem you face today.

This is where true, out-of-the-box creativity comes from. AI is good at optimizing within the grid; you’re good at jumping to a whole new grid, finding the adjacent possible of true innovation.

3. You Learn by Falling Down; AI Learns by Reading the Dictionary.

When I was 9, I learned a lot by crashing my minibike going too fast up a ramp. My body learned a thousand things about speed, gravity, and the texture of gravel. That’s embodied learning. We learn with our hands, our skin, our whole being. AI learns from a dataset. It can read every book published, but it has never felt the sun on its face or shock of cold water.

Humans can also learn from one or two examples. Show a kid a dog, and they get “dog” without seeing a million pictures. A study in Science showed humans can learn a new written character from one example because we understand the process of how it’s made, not just the finished pixels.

You can walk into a new situation and figure it out on the fly because you have a physical, intuitive grasp of how the world works.

You’re adaptable because your “data” is the entire world, not just a text file. This capability is crucial for any job that requires rapid adaptation with incomplete information.

4. AI Knows That; You Know Why.

AI is a master of correlation. It knows lightning is followed by thunder, but has no deep understanding lightning causes thunder. You do. You build mental models. You ask, “Why?” This is causal reasoning.

Some studies indicate AI systems can mimic aspects of causal reasoning, but they still lack the flexibility and adaptability of humans. This allows you to plan for the future, troubleshoot a problem, and imagine different outcomes.

Your strength is strategy, diagnostics, and true problem-solving. AI can tell you which sales pitch is correlated with the most success.

You can figure out why a strategy works and design a whole new one based on that human insight. You’re a strategist, detective, and scientist.

The bottom line? Don’t try to be a better, faster AI. Lean into what makes you a messy, intuitive, creative, and embodied human.

  1. Get Your Hands Dirty. Don’t just analyze data; go see the real thing. Talk to the customer. Build a prototype. Work with your hands. Connect your brain to the real, physical world.
  2. Ask “Why?” Relentlessly. Be the person in the meeting who moves past what happened to why it happened. Dig for the root cause – where your true value as a problem-solver lies.
  3. Master Human Connection. Look people in the eye. Build trust. Inspire a team. Negotiate with nuance and empathy. These skills are a complex dance of our messy, emotional brains. AI can fake it, but can’t feel it. People know the difference.
  4. Be an Idea-Cross-Pollinator. Read history. Learn an instrument. Talk to people outside your field. Your brain’s 3-D jungle thrives on diverse, weird inputs. That’s how you come up with ideas that no AI, trained on predictable past patterns, could generate.
  5. Learn to Learn, Fast. Your ability to learn from a single example is your superpower. Your value isn’t in one thing you know now, but in your infinite capacity to learn the next thing. Be a real time, lifelong learner. ChatGPT 4o’s training data cutoff was Oct. 2023. You can train on any new topic today.

Surviving and thriving the AI revolution won’t be quick or easy. It will take training and stamina. In my next two posts, I will provide two training plans to ensure your brain is fit for the competition with AI for jobs. One plan is for mid-career professionals and one for students.

This Was 80% Human Generated Content!

The initial ideas were my own, so were beginning parts of a rough draft. I used Google Gemini 2.5 Pro Thinking for my research. Interestingly, I got better results when I asked the model to respond to my prompt again after running 10 miles. Thanks to Christopher Penn for his “Add a Banana” AI principle. I ended up verifying and finding my own research to back findings. Gemini made up some references and others were outdated. I also used Gemini to refine my headline for engagement and SEO. I used Gemini 2.0 Flash to generate the graphic.