Stop asking it things. Start handing it jobs.
Putting myself out there about AI - You are not alone if...
you don't really, fully get what these phrases mean:
Ai Prompt
Prompt Like A Pro
Prompt Engineer
Prompt Framework
Ai Agent
Automate WorkFlow
WorkFlow Dashboard
Ai Hallucination
Generative AI
SKILLS File
Ai Connectors
Ai Artifacts
Or If:
You worry it will eliminate your job because you see it happening around you
You feel technology can already be challenging, and this is beyond
You value relationships, person to person contacts, and you can't imagine a world where Ai intercepts your relationship with your financial planner, insurance broker, business coach.
You ask it general questions, like an advanced Google bar and have not gone past that yet
You use it to create graphics for social, write posts and emails and some reports and haven't gone past that yet
You ask it harder research questions and don't get good answers
You use it to help your kids with homework
You worry that it can write books, school papers, do the homework, and how will anyone learn to be a critical thinker, create for themselves or have an original thought
It is changing things, so make it useful
The fact is that our world has always evolved, but those past evolutions have moved so much slower than this one. It is a little scary, and it can seem out of reach to even keep up a little bit.
In our everyday life, we still have an impact, and we'll need to be critical thinkers and be able to have original thoughts, because AI operates on how well we can communicate with it to get the results that we want. And that alone takes individual common sense and knowledge.
If you try to think of AI in this way, it might help you be able to use it for so many advantages:
Talk to your AI platform just like you would talk to your administrative or executive assistant. It is like a real person. Imagine if you used it like an executive assistant to handle all of the tasks that took so much time out of your day. How much more efficient could that make everything?
So let's start with the words.
None of them are as complicated as they sound. Most are things you already do at work, with a new label stuck on.
AI Prompt. What you ask for. That is the whole definition. A prompt is the ask.
Prompt Like A Pro. The idea that there is a secret phrasing. There isn't. It is how you explain yourself, just like you would explain yourself to a person you are delegating to. Being good at this means being specific: say what you want, who it's for, what finished looks like, and what to leave out. It's the brief you'd give a new hire on their first day.
Prompt Engineer. A job title for whoever writes the ask. The real skill is not clever wording. It is understanding how the work should flow, what happens at each stage, what has to be finished before the next step can start, and what the end of it looks like. Anyone who knows their own process that well is already most of the way there.
Prompt Framework. Somebody's named recipe for writing that ask, usually role, task, context, format. Useful training wheels. You stop needing them.
AI Agent. An assistant that does, instead of one that answers. It takes several steps on its own, uses your tools, works down a list, and comes back when it's finished. The difference between asking someone a question and handing them an assignment.
Automate WorkFlow. Taking a string of steps you do by hand every week and having them run on a schedule, instead of running on somebody remembering.
WorkFlow Dashboard. One screen where that whole thing lives. What's due, what's waiting, what you already did, what's next.
AI Hallucination. When it says something confidently that isn't true. It's real, it's manageable, and it's exactly why a person approves anything before it leaves your building.
Generative AI. AI that makes something new, a draft, an image, a spreadsheet, instead of finding something that already exists. This is the part that is not a search engine.
SKILLS File. Instructions you save once, so a job you repeat gets done your way every time. Your format, your voice, your rules, without explaining them again.
AI Connectors. The wiring that lets it reach something you already use. Your inbox, your calendar, your CRM, your files.
AI Artifacts. The things it builds and keeps for you. A document, a dashboard, a page you can open and send to somebody.
Now read that list again and notice what it adds up to. Twelve phrases, and not one of them is about technology you have to operate. Every one of them is about delegating.
Now the harder half of your list.
The words are defined. The worries underneath them are the real thing, and they deserve straight answers.
"It will eliminate my job."
The work that goes first is almost never the work you were hired for. It's the work nobody wanted to own. Rebuilding the same report every Monday. Chasing the thing that was supposed to come back last week. Copying numbers out of one system and into another. I have yet to meet an owner who told me the best part of their week was reconciling a spreadsheet. What doesn't transfer is judgment, knowing which customer needs a call today, knowing when a number on the page is wrong, knowing what to do about it.
"I value relationships. I can't imagine AI in the middle of them."
Neither can I, and it doesn't have to be. Think about your own financial planner. The one you'd keep is not the one who automated you away. It's the one who remembers your daughter's name and calls you before you call him. Give that man back the four hours a week he spends on paperwork and you get more of him, not less. The tool goes where the paperwork is. The relationship stays exactly where it was.
"If it can write the paper, how does anyone learn to think?"
This is the one I take most seriously, and your own instinct is the answer to it. AI gives back only what someone was able to ask for. A vague ask gets a vague answer, and the person reading it can't tell the difference unless they already know the subject. That makes judgment worth more, not less. And, if we are living in reality, it is possible that writing a paper is no longer the best way to show the research and what was learned. With Ai, research looks different, assessing looks different, and the final product could solve more, talk less.
"Technology is already challenging, and this is beyond me."
It isn't. I promise. It feels that way because nobody handed you the vocabulary before they started selling you the tools. That's backwards, and it's fixable in an afternoon. And just like with any other tech, you MUST give yourself patience to get through.
Back to your assistant.
You already landed on the part that matters most, so let me take it one step further.
When you hire an executive assistant, a marketing manager, an operations manager, you don't open with a general question. You give them a job, with context. Here's who it's for. Here's what I want it to sound like. Here's what finished looks like. Here's what to leave out. Then you read what comes back and tell them what to change.
That's the whole skill. It isn't technical, and you have done it your entire career.
It's also why the harder research questions come back weak. Not because it can't do the work, but because the ask was two lines long and your assistant didn't know your business, your customer, or what you were planning to do with the answer.
So here is the shift. Stop asking it things. Start handing it jobs.
Read these forty pages and tell me the five things I actually have to decide
Draft the follow-up to everyone I met last week, in my voice, and leave them in my email for me to approve
Build me a list of every customer I haven't spoken to in six months, in order of what they're worth
Turn this month's numbers into the one-page summary I rebuild by hand every month
Watch for news about these twenty companies and tell me when something changes
Take this long document and write the version my team will actually read
Every one of those is a job you would hand a person. Not one of them asks you to understand how any of it works.
Put it to work this week
Don't start with the tool. Start with the list.
For one week, every time you catch yourself doing something you resent or would rather procrastinate, write it down. Don't filter it. Don't stop to decide whether it's possible. Just catch it.
On Friday, read your list and mark three things:
The one that eats the most hours
The one that gets dropped the most
The one only you know how to do
The first is where you'll feel the difference fastest. The second is where it's worth the most money. The third is the one to be most careful about handing over, and the one worth writing down properly either way.
Where I can help
This is the work I do as an AI Strategist. We find the job worth handing over, I build the dashboard it lives in, and I stay on while your team gets used to it. There are two dashboards built you can open and click around in to feel what that looks like, a job search run as an operation, and a sales prospecting floor on one screen. Both run on invented companies, so nothing you touch is real.
Let's talk about your list
The Q&A call is free and it isn't a sales process. Bring the list you made on Friday and we'll pick the one worth doing first.
Here's to asking better questions!
– Dana
