Business

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.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brain With AI, Don’t Weaken it.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brainpower With AI, Don’t Weaken It.
~ K. Quesenberry ~ 1 Comment

In a previous post, Afraid of Being Replaced by AI? we looked at research on the physical differences human brains have with AI neural networks. It revealed unique capabilities our brains have over AI.

My next post presented a cognitive training plan for mid-career professionals to use AI in ways that strengthen their irreplaceable human capabilities, not weaken them. In this post, we’ll look at ways students can use AI to strengthen their fight against AI for jobs.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brainpower With AI, Don’t Weaken it.

Reports indicate that AI is disrupting the entry-level job market for college students. With recent articles predicting a broken career ladder and some saying an AI job apocalypse may already be here. While much is out of your control, there are things you can do to prepare. It takes a growth mindset and thinking past today’s assignment and grade.

It’s no secret AI provides easy, tempting ways to complete assignments. But the way you learn matters as much as the degree you receive. Think past today and focus on what will be best at graduation.

We can only leverage the unique capabilities of our human brains if we use and train them. Your goal in college isn’t to get an A. It’s to build a mind that’s sharp, adaptable, and creative within a discipline.

If you let AI lift the “cognitive weights,” you won’t build brainpower. This doesn’t mean avoid AI altogether. A savvy student will use it as a personal trainer to push, challenge, and help them achieve new levels of expertise. Here’s how to use AI in ways that accentuate not replace your unique human skills.

1. Reading & Research: AI as Guide & Tutor

Cognitive Workout: The struggle of reading a dense, difficult text and connecting its ideas to what you already know. This builds the rich, “messy” web of knowledge that creates insight.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): “Summarize this 35-page chapter for me.” You get the facts but skip the workout of critical reading and synthesis.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Use AI as a Tour Guide (Before Reading): “I’m about to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. What are the 3-5 core concepts I should look for? Define terms like ‘invisible hand’ and ‘division of labor’ for me.”
  • Use AI as a Tutor (During Reading): When you hit a wall, don’t give up. Ask for help. “Can you explain this specific paragraph in simpler terms? I’m confused about the concept of ‘fiat currency’.”
  • Use AI as a Quizmaster (After Reading): To check your own understanding, prompt: “Ask me five challenging questions about free-market philosophy. Don’t give me the answers until I try first.”

Result: AI helps you prepare to navigate the difficult terrain of learning, but you’re still the one thinkingh. You build the mental muscle of critical reading and information synthesis essential for knowledge-based careers.

2. Lectures & Notetaking: AI as Study Partner

Cognitive Workout: The act of listening, filtering what’s important, and synthesizing it into your own handwritten notes. This hardwires concepts into your memory through embodied cognition.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): Using an AI generated transcript as a substitute for taking your own notes. You become a passive recorder, not an active learner.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Take Your Own Notes First: When you know AI’s not recording everything you’re more motivated to pay attention in the moment. The act of writing and drawing connections is core to learning.
  • Use AI to Enhance Your Notes: After class, use AI to improve what you’ve already created. “Here are my messy notes from the lecture. Can you help me organize them into a clean outline for a study guide?”
  • Use AI for Gap Analysis: “Here are the slides, lecture notes, study guide, and my notes. What key topics from the professor’s resources did I miss or cover sparingly?”

Result: You get the full cognitive benefit of live synthesis. Then, AI acts as a study partner, helping you organize, review, and spot weaknesses in your understanding. This can supplement a professor’s or TA’s office hours with a 24/7 tutor trained on your specific class.

3. Class Participation: AI as Private Debate Coach

Cognitive Workout: Articulating a half-formed idea, thinking on your feet, and responding to challenges from professors and peers. This builds mental agility, plus skills and practice in persuasive communication.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): Staying silent in class because you can ask AI for the “perfect” answer later, avoiding all risk.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Use AI as a Sparring Partner: Before class, prepare for the debate. “I want to argue that the movie The Wolf of Wall Street fails to capture the nuances of the main character’s motivations in Jordan Belfort’s memoir. Act as someone who disagrees to challenge my position with counterarguments.”
  • Use AI for Perspective-Taking: “I need to understand the ‘utilitarian’ ethical framework for my business ethics class. Explain it to me as a non-expert and then give a real-world scenario where it would conflict with ‘virtue ethics.'”

Result: You enter class discussion better prepared, more confident, and with a deeper understanding of multiple viewpoints. AI helps you build mental resilience to respond in unpredictable, live human debates. You build soft skills with your discipline’s hard skills.

4. Writing & Assignments: AI as A Sounding Board & Editor

Cognitive Workout: The struggle of starting with a blank page and building your own structured, logical, and original argument. This is a mental workout for causal and abstract reasoning skills.

AI Trap (Letting AI Do It): “Write an essay about the impact of social media on teenage mental health.” You get a paper, but don’t gain experience in learning how to think. It can also be academic dishonesty if you turn it in unchanged as your own work.

AI Savvy Student (Using AI as a Tool):

  • Use it as an Idea Generator: “I’m writing about the 2007-8 financial crisis. Suggest 10 non-obvious research questions I could explore beyond the typical narrative.”
  • Use it as an Outline Critic: After you create your own outline, ask for feedback. “Here’s my thesis and main points. Is it a logical flow? What’s the weakest argument?”
  • Use it as a “Rubber Duck“: When a paragraph feels clunky, paste it in and ask: “What am I trying to say here? Help me rephrase this for clarity.”
  • Use it as an Editor: After you’ve done the hard work, let it polish your creation. “Check this for grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, and inconsistent tone.” But don’t let AI replace your tone! Remember to maintain your unique voice.

Result: You maintain ownership of the core intellectual work: the research, the thinking, and the creation of the argument. AI serves as a collaborator that helps you brainstorm, test your logic, and polish your final product to make your own work even better.

AI for College Students: Strengthen Your Brainpower With AI, Don’t Weaken It. A summary workout reminder on how to be more human as a student training for an AI saturated job market. Click on image to download a PDF.

With any AI use, keep in mind that you’re responsible for the final output. Fact-check all results. Even the best reasoning and deep research models hallucinate making up research, stats, and references. Also, check your university and professor’s AI use policies to avoid plagiarism. Follow university, professor and internship employer guidelines on data privacy and uploading copyrighted, sensitive, or proprietary material.

These are just a couple examples for these use cases. Review the AI Prompt Framework for more guidance on how to craft prompts that perform well. For more details on how AI can help or harm your learning, see the post and infographic that shows how AI Can Skip the Stages of the Cognitive Learning Process. See this post for a look at How AI Agents May Impact Marketing Jobs and this post for how you can prepare with AI Vibe Marketing.

This Was 75% 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. 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. That’s what helped send me in this training your brain direction which draws from my personal experience training for marathons. I added my own support articles, perspective on examples, and wrote in my own voice. Gemini 2.0 Flash generated the brain lifting weights graphic.