corporate communication

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 Task Framework: Examples of What I’d Outsource To AI And What I Wouldn’t.

Copilot created this image of a college age man sitting said in a basement looking lonely at an old dusty unused exercise bike.
~ K. Quesenberry ~ 1 Comment

This is the second post in a series of five on AI. In my last post, I introduced an AI task framework to be more intentional about why and how we use AI in our jobs, businesses, or organizations. In this post, I give examples based on my previous advertising career.

AI Framework Template for AI Use Click on the image to download a PDF template.

As an advertising copywriter, some everyday Tasks and Goals included:

  1. Fill out timesheets detailing what I worked on each day to bill time to clients and projects to get paid.
  2. Research a client’s business and industry to demonstrate knowledge of their unique challenges and opportunities.
  3. Create ideas for campaigns and individual ads to sell to a client and publish to meet marketing objectives.
  4. Write social media ad copy for social media marketing to generate engagement and conversions for a client.

(1.) I would outsource timesheets to AI.

I envision an AI assistant that Extracts (AI Function) file use logs from programs like Microsoft Word, Categorizes (AI Function) by job number, and Creates (Level of Thinking) a spreadsheet listing client, job, and time. I could review and adjust it before submitting.

After thinking of this example, I discovered that Microsoft is adding this capability. Copilot for time entry creates time entries for team members without navigating through forms or filling details with dropdowns, generating first drafts for users to modify and confirm for timesheet submission.

The Level of Thinking in this example is Applying a process to Create a suggestion for my time entry (AI Capabilities). It doesn’t require creativity or imagination and I maintain final human judgment on accuracy (Distinctive Human Skill). By tracking job numbers no Copyrighted or Proprietary data is used. Human impact is positive. Everyone I knew hated timesheets. We loved coming up with ideas (Legal & Ethical Use).

(2.) AI could help with some aspects of client research.

AI could Answer Questions (AI Function) like “What are the current challenges and opportunities in the ice cream industry?” An open system like GPT would give me general answers based on open sources from the internet that may or may not be the most current, accurate, or relevant.

AI is Understanding (Level of Thinking) on a cursory level (AI Capability). To contextualize this understanding to your client and judge for accuracy (Distinctive Human Skill) you need proprietary data from paid databases like Mintel, your client, or your own research. Your personal experience with the client or industry is an added Distinctive Human Skill.

You could outsource this to AI by uploading proprietary data into an AI model Summarize and Ask Questions. (AI Function). But you’re uploading Copyrighted/Proprietary material without permission (Legal & Ethical Use). Mintel forbids input into AI systems and clients are adding AI restrictions to contracts to protect their data from training LLM models a competitor could use.

Some are developing Closed AI versus Open AI systems that run locally storing data on their computers versus the cloud. The ad/PR agency network Publicis is investing in an internal AI built on proprietary data. When available this could be a great way to quickly get up to speed on a business and industry.

How much I’d outsource depends on my previous experience. If it was a new client or market I was unfamiliar with I may worry how much I’d Understand (Level of Thinking) or Remember (Level of Thinking) if AI did it all. In an in-person meeting could I recall or contextualize the information on the fly?

(3.) AI could help with some parts of idea generation.

I would outsource some brainstorming to AI, not idea formation, but AI could give me more material for ideas by Answering Questions (AI Function). Let’s say my client wants to sell water bottles to 25-34-year-olds. I could ask “What do 25-34-year-olds who work out look for in a water bottle?” and “What are current trends with 25-34-year-olds who work out?”

With these prompts, GPT via Copilot Created (Level of Thinking) a list of alternatives (AI capability). From the list, I put together a feature “one-hand operation” with a trend of “functional fitness.” Then I Asked for functional fitness examples. From that list, I put together a humorous image or video scene of a young woman easily sipping out of her Owala water bottle with one hand while swinging a heavy Kettlebell with the other. This formulated an original solution (Distinctive Human Skill).

Evaluating AI responses and knowing what to Ask (Level of Thinking) comes from knowledge of the client, problem, market, target, and trends to discern the best and identify AI hallucinations. I’d also use my domain expertise of what concepts are good Remembering (Level of Thinking) from my long-term memory of 17 years of creating ideas for clients (Distinctive Human Skill).

I wouldn’t have AI write ad copy or scripts directly. If it isn’t mostly Created by a human, it can’t be copyrighted to sell to your client or to protect them from use by competitors (Legal & Ethical Use). I’d also check my agency and client for specific restrictions on AI. Your Knowledge (Level of Thinking) of the client and humans (Distinctive Human Skill) is better at Creating (Level of Thinking) less generic more human copy and scripts.

(4.) AI could help in parts of social media campaign creation.

AI could help brainstorm content Answering (AI Function) “What kind of content do 25-34-year-olds who work out like to see on social media?” I’d Evaluate (Level of Thinking) AI’s best suggestions (Distinctive Human Skill). One was “personal anecdotes.” It reminded me of an insight I read in a Mintel report about unused home workout equipment.

I combine this with the text “Peloton brings the motivation of a community to your home.” This gave me a visual idea of unused home workout equipment. I could mockup the social idea using AI to Generate (AI Function) the image. I’d ask “Create an image of an unused, dusty, stationary bike in a basement with a lonely looking guy” (Level of Thinking). This image would help me sell the idea to the client.

Generated with AI (DALL-E 3 via Copilot Designer ∙ June 25, 2024 at 1:33 PM

After approval, my art director and I would consider Copyright issues. Using AI-created artwork for commercial use is unsettled due to sources for training data. Adobe Firefly claimed to be copyright-compliant, but revelations about training data may put Firefly users at legal risk. A trusted photographer may be best to ensure compliance (Legal & Ethical Use).

We’d also consider that the medium sends a message. Does an artificial human and image support Petoton’s message of genuine human connection? I’d weigh the risk of uncanny valley. When tech gets too close to human people get an unsettled feeling. That creepy feeling can be transferred into negative feelings about the brand. Toys R Us and Under Armour have faced backlash for using AI generated video in this way. Google sparked backlash over an ad where a dad had AI write a letter for his daughter because it had to be perfect (Legal & Ethical Use).

I can’t help thinking about the human impact. I’ve worked with many talented creators who add to my ideas with their expertise. If we all decide to use AI instead, photographers, models, illustrators, designers, and writers lose their livelihoods. Levi’s faced a backlash after announcing they’d use AI generated models (Legal & Ethical Use).

Creating content variations (AI Capabilities) is a tedious part of social media. AI could help Generate (AI Function) variations to fit different platforms. I could ask “Write this copy ‘Peloton brings the motivation and community of a gym to the convenience of your home’ in 10 different ways.” I could also tell it to write a specific length for each platform’s character limits. This type of AI outsourcing is happening. Meta Ad Manager is adding Text Variations and social media management software Hootsuite has OwlyWriter AI.

Going through this AI task exercise makes me hopeful.

Breaking down my job into tasks making intentional decisions on what to outsource to AI gives me hope. It reminds me of our human agency. It helps me visualize what Mollick describes in his book Co-Intelligence. Instead of replacing all human tasks, we can use AI as Centaur (division of tasks) and Cyborg (intertwined alternating subtasks).

Once you decide what tasks to outsource you need to know how to ask AI to get the best results. In my next post, I’ll dive deeper into prompt writing.

This Was Human Created Content!