AI for Professionals: Deepen Your Expertise With AI, Don’t Outsource It.

AI Training for Knowledge Workers: A Guide to Augment Your Intelligence, Not Replace It.

In my last post, Afraid of Being Replaced by AI? we looked at the physical differences between human brains and AI neural networks. We discovered unique capabilities our brains have over AI. Yet, in the fight with AI for jobs, we can only leverage those unique brain capabilities if we use them.

AI Training for Knowledge Workers: A Guide to Augment Your Intelligence, Not Replace It.
Image created with Gemini 2.0 Flash Image generator https://aistudio.google.com

Use AI for everything, and you could lose your human brain advantage. Working your brain in specific ways, like physical training, is essential to maintain and develop function.

The goal is not to avoid AI. News continues to reveal more tasks being outsourced to AI. In a recent interview, CEO Marc Benioff claims AI can do 30%-50% of work tasks at Salesforce.

The goal is to remain valuable in your job by building up your irreplaceable human skills. Some companies like Bank of New York Mellon are already utilizing digital employees working alongside human counterparts for coding and validating payment instructions.

To build up your human cognitive abilities, don’t approach AI as a replacement for thinking, but as a powerful research assistant, data analyst, and co-thinker. Let AI do the mechanical so you can do the strategic.

It’s tempting to let AI do it all. But your brain will get less fit and you’re basically telling your employer they don’t need you. Instead, use AI in ways to build up your brain in areas that accentuate your value.

Instead of training AI to replace you, use it to help you be irreplaceable. Treat AI as a cognitive sparring partner to strengthen your innate human abilities.

To get started, here are some workouts to train your brain in ways that make your humanity more valuable.

1. Engage with Primary Sources; Use AI as a Research Magnifier

Cognitive Workout: Finding a single “aha!” moment in a sea of raw data, customer reviews, or project reports. This requires synthesis and insight.

AI Trap (AI Replaces): “Summarize these 1,000 customer reviews for me.” You get the conclusion without the context and miss the surprising, outlier details where real opportunity lies.

Human Value (AI Augments): You use AI as a powerful lens to navigate the source material yourself. How? See AI prompt examples below.

  • Prompt: “Analyze these 1,000 reviews and cluster them into the top five recurring themes. Then show three verbatim examples of each.”
  • Prompt: “Search this entire project file and identify all mentions of ‘risk’ or ‘delay’. Then show the full paragraphs where each mention appears.”
  • Prompt: “In this sales data, highlight anomalies that deviate more than 20% from the quarterly average.”

Result: AI does arduous tasks of searching and sorting – low-cognitive-load work. You reserve your brain’s energy for high-value human tasks: looking at the organized raw material and asking, “Why is this happening? What’s the hidden story here?” You’re the detective. AI gave you an organized case file.

2. Strategic Note-Taking: Use AI as a Post-Meeting Debriefer

Cognitive Workout: Actively listening and synthesizing a live conversation into key themes and action items.

AI Trap (AI Replaces): Using an automated AI transcript as a substitute for paying attention in a meeting.

Human Value (AI Augments): You still take strategic, handwritten notes during the meeting forcing you to listen and filter in real time. After, leverage AI for insightful follow-up. How? Here’s some AI prompt examples.

  • Prompt: “Here’s the meeting transcript, and here’s my personal notes. Synthesize both into a draft email including key decisions, assigned action items, and owners.”
  • Prompt: “Based on this transcript, what were the main points of disagreement? What topic had the most energy behind it?”
  • Prompt: “Based on the meeting transcript, my personal notes, main points of disagreement, and most energetic topics, what top three changes should I prioritize in this marketing plan?”

Result: You get the full cognitive benefit of live synthesis, ensuring you understand the meeting’s flow and dynamics. Then, you use AI to save time on the administrative task of writing a perfect summary, freeing you to think about the next strategic move.

3. Driving the Discussion: Use AI as a Private Sparring Partner

Cognitive Workout: Thinking on your feet, articulating a persuasive argument, and navigating complex social dynamics while engaged in a live setting.

AI Trap (AI Replaces): Staying silent and asking the AI for the “right answer” later.

Human Value (AI Augments): You use AI to prepare for and learn from the human interaction. You use it as a private trainer. How? Below are some AI prompt examples.

  • Pre-Meeting Prompt: “I’m about to propose _______. Act as a skeptical CFO and give me the three toughest questions you’d ask about my plan.”
  • Pre-Meeting Prompt: “Help me rephrase my main point for an audience of engineers versus an audience of marketers.”
  • Post-Meeting Prompt: “I felt some resistance when I presented my idea. Based on what I’ve told you, what are some likely underlying concerns I didn’t address?”

Result: AI helps you anticipate challenges, refine thinking, and build empathy for other perspectives. This makes your live in-person contribution more insightful, persuasive, and resilient amplifying human social intelligence.

4. Authoring Your Own Strategy: Use AI as a Creative Sounding Board

Cognitive Workout: The “blank page” struggle of structuring a novel argument, building a logical narrative, and creating a clear vision from scratch. This is where true ownership and deep understanding are born.

AI Trap (AI Replaces): “Write a three-year strategic plan for my division.” You get a generic, soulless document you can’t truly defend because you didn’t build it.

Human Value (AI Augments): You do the hard work of core ideation first. Then you bring in AI as a collaborator to refine and challenge your thinking. How? See these AI prompt examples.

  • Prompt (After you’ve outlined): “Here is my core thesis and my three supporting pillars. What is the weakest part of this argument? What have I overlooked?”
  • Prompt (After you’ve written a draft): “My goal is to inspire my team. Analyze the tone of this draft and suggest ways to make it more compelling and visionary.”
  • Prompt (For creativity): “Give me an analogy from biology or history that could help explain this complex business concept to my client.”

Result: You maintain full ownership of the core strategy and logic. AI acts as a 24/7 editor, critic, and muse to help test and polish your human-generated idea into the best version.

A summary workout reminder on how to be more human in your job to compete in an AI job market. Click on image to download a PDF.

With any AI use, remember that you’re responsible for the final output. Fact-check AI outputs, avoid plagiarism, and maintain your unique voice. This is where human discipline expertise can shine – not taking everything AI confidently says at face value.

Also, know your company and client AI use policies. Be mindful of uploading copyrighted, sensitive, or proprietary material into LLMs.

For more ideas on how AI can be a cognitive sparring partner to improve your ideas, see my post Why AI Flattery Fails. For a look at how AI can help you iterate ideas for faster innovation, see my post on AI Vibe Marketing.

You, the human, must always be the one asking “why” and setting the intent. Use AI for the “what” and “how”—let it search, sort, draft, and critique. This allows you more time and energy to deep, creative, and strategic thinking that machines cannot replace, making you more valuable, less replaceable.

In my next post, I’ll provide a similar cognitive training plan for students. How can you begin using AI in these ways for your job today?

This Was 75% Human Generated Content! 

The initial ideas were my own, and so were the 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. I added my own support articles and perspective on examples. I used Gemini 2.0 Flash to generate the graphic.

Generative AI Has Come Quick: What’s Out, What’s Coming, and What to Consider.

A table of Generative AI tool options.

ChatGPT was released to the public six months ago and quickly became the fastest application to reach 100 million users. OpenAI reached this milestone in just two months compared to TikTok’s 9 months and Instagram’s 2 ½ years.

The result of this enormous attention is that the world has quickly become aware of the advanced capabilities of generative AI. As of March 2023, 87% of consumers had heard of AI and 61% somewhat understood what generative AI is and how it works.

ChatGPT generates text from text prompts through a chatbot, but that’s not all generative AI can do. The popularity of ChatGPT also brought attention to OpenAI’s image generation tool. DALL-E 2 generates images from text prompts through a chatbot.

A table listing and describing generative AI integration in major software platforms.
Which generative AI tools will you use for digital and social media marketing?

Despite the mass attention, AI tools have been around for years.

I first wrote about AI in a 2019 post “Artificial Intelligence And Social Media. How AI Can Improve Your Job Not Steal It.” In it, I talked about how AI was being used in algorithms, automation, machine learning, natural language processing, and image recognition.

That post also talked about how AI was used in chatbots to simulate human conversion, in predictive and prescriptive analytics, and in content generation. Examples included Patern89 which has been using AI to analyze content combinations and placement for optimization since 2016. Another example was Clinch which has used AI for content automation and personalized dynamic ad content across channels for years.

Since ChatGPTs release, there’s been a race to integrate generative AI.

The race began with ChatGPT being added to Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Then Google announced plans to integrate its generative AI Bard into Google search. Other platforms quickly announced integrations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard such as Salesforce, Hootsuite, HubSpot, and Adobe. Microsoft and Google are even integrating ChaptGPT and Bard into Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace office software for writing, spreadsheets, and slides.

Yet they’re not the only options. Other generative AI tools include Jasper.ai and Copy.ai, for writing, and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for image generation. Tools like Synthsia generates videos with human avatars and professional voiceovers from text prompts. Other examples of generative AI are summarized below.

  AI content generation tool uses:

  • Content research/Data collection
  • Brainstorming/Idea generation
  • Copywriting/Copyediting
  • Summarizing/Note taking
  • Image (photo/illustration) generation
  • Video clip/Podcast clip generation
  • Transcript generation/Automated post prep
  • Ad/Post variation generation
  • Video generation
  • Podcast/Voice over generation
  • Presentation generation

Generative AI tools come with new skills and considerations.

A new skill with these next gen tools is prompt writing. Prompts are the natural language used to ask a generative AI tool to produce something. More descriptive specific prompts produce better results like prompts that describe the tone of writing or style of an image. Yet be mindful potential of copyright issues with prompts to create text or an image in the style of a famous person without their permission.

A new consideration is the data set from which you train AI. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are trained on data from the open internet. This is what makes it so powerful, but this is also what can lead to copyright issues and sometimes create bias or incorrect results.

Other AI tools like Jasper.ai allow you to train on a specific dataset. For example, a brand could upload all its previous materials to establish a brand voice to write new copy. Adobe’s Firefly draws from Adobe’s stock library and tracks creator images used to ensure copyright compliance.

With the explosion of AI comes limitations and cautions.

Despite the mass adoption, this technology is in its early stages. There hasn’t been a lot of testing. Regulations, laws, and professional standards have yet to be developed. HubSpot suggests the following limitations, cautions, and warnings in using generative AI tools.

  Cautions when using generative AI:

  • AI can’t conduct original research or analysis.
  • AI can get things wrong so you must fact check.
  • AI doesn’t have lived experience and human insight.
  • AI doesn’t ensure quality, strategy, and nuance.
  • AI can contain biases that are not caught by filters.
  • AI can have plagiarism and copyright issues.

Despite these cautions, alarm over societal harm, and escalating calls for regulation, the AI race is on. Even while companies, government, and scientists raise concerns, companies continue to integrate AI into mainstream products and services. Below is a sample of what’s been released or announced thus far.

Examples of Early AI Content Generation and Automation Tools in Major Platforms.

Platform Tool Function
Hootsuite OwlyWriter AI Generates social media captions from URLs in different tone or voice, content ideas from prompts, auto recreation of top posts, and calendar events copy.
HubSpot Content Assistant Generate copy for blog posts, landing pages, emails and other content from idea to outline and copy generation.
ChatSpot Conversational bot that automates CRM tasks including status updates, managing leads, finding prospects, generating reports, forecasts, and follow-up drafts.
Salesforce Einstein GPT Auto-generates sales, service, and marketing tasks, content, targeting, messaging, reporting and personalization across channels.
Adobe Firefly Generate images, fill, text effects, and recolor from text prompts plus create content, and templates and edit video with simple text prompts – some inside Creative Suite.
Sensei GenAI Automates tasks, optimizes and generates content and content variations across channels in Adobe’s Experience Cloud marketing platform.
Canva Magic Write Generates copy, outlines, lists, captions, ideas, and drafts from text prompts.
AI Image Generator Generates images from text prompts and various styles and aspect ratios.
Meta AI Sandbox Tools that generate multiple versions of text and backgrounds, plus autocropping creative assets for various ad formats on Facebook and Instagram.
Grammarly GrammarlyGo
Generates writing and revisions relevant to tone, clarity, length, and task via text prompts in documents, emails, messages, and social media.
Microsoft Microsoft 365 Copilot Generates tasks, content, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, emails, reports, summaries, updates across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams via text prompts and Business Chat.
Google Google Workspace Bard Generate drafts, replies, summaries in Gmail, drafts, summaries, proofs in Docs, images, audio and video in Slides, auto analysis in Sheets, and notes in Meet.

Do Consumers (Your Customers/Target Audience) Want AI?

Another consideration with artificial intelligence is the value consumers may put on human generated content and transparency in the use of AI. I began this article by saying that 87% of consumers are now aware of AI. In fact, 4 in 5 of them are convinced that it is the future.

Yet knowing something is the future and wanting that future are different things. The same consumer survey reveals that 3 in 5 (60%) are concerned or undecided about that future. What people are most concerned about is that AI will change what it means to be human.

As marketing communications professionals we need to stay up to date with all these technology advancements. We should use the latest tools to improve our profession and results for our business or clients. But we should also ensure that new technology is used responsibly and transparently.

Over 77% of consumers say brands should ensure biases and systems of inequality are not propagated by AI-based applications. Over 70% believe brands should disclose when they use AI to develop products, services, experiences, and content.

You Decide How To Best Use AI.

At its best, AI can help with the mundane, repetitive tasks of social media and digital marketing management. At its best, AI will enable you to focus on higher level strategic thinking. At its best, AI will not replace humans, but enable us to be more human.

It’s been 6 months since generative AI was brought to mainstream awareness. Companies are rushing to integrate this technology into everything they do. While we wait for regulations, laws, and professional standards to catch up, let’s use our own judgment in deciding when, where, and how best to use it.

For my latest insights into AI, I began a blog series in Summer 2024 with

Artificial Intelligence Use: A Framework For Determining What Tasks to Outsource To AI [Template]

This Was Human Created Content!