Keith A Quesenberry

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

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

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.

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 ~ Leave a 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.