5 Essential Strategies to Master Your AI Workplace Tools
5 Essential Strategies to Master Your AI Workplace Tools
Published on Inc., Mar 19, 2025, by Shayne Fitz-Coy.
AI is transforming every aspect of the modern workplace. These tools are writing customer emails, conducting research, creating presentations, and developing ad campaigns. Whatever we’re asking of our AI assistants, they’re giving it their best shot.
Their ease of use makes them exceedingly tempting to use for…everything! It’s as though every worker in America has suddenly received a “free” assistant. But as anyone who has managed assistants knows, their productivity and helpfulness depend entirely on how well you manage this valuable resource. Here are five essential strategies to ensure your AI tools make you look good, not the other way around.
- Know your AI tool’s limits
What’s it good at? What’s it bad at? If you don’t know, and you have it do your bidding willy-nilly, you might learn the hard way that ChatGPT makes things up when it doesn’t really know the answer. Why? Because it’s not looking for the truth; it’s just looking for information to parrot. And there’s a lot of bad information out there.
One person I know asked ChatGPT to summarize labor law in South Korea, and among many things that were true, it also claimed that race was a protected characteristic in Korean labor law. (It is not.) Understand the limits of your AI tool of choice and stay within them.
- Assign work in manageable chunks
Don’t try to dump all your work on your AI tool at once. Instead, start with a chunk of the assignment. Ask it to refine its execution until the product is good. Then ask for the next step.
Try experimenting: Ask ChatGPT to write you a five-paragraph essay about life. You’ll get platitudes. Instead, ask it to write an outline for a five-paragraph essay about the meaning of life. Give feedback on the outline. When you’re satisfied, ask it to flesh out the outline one paragraph at a time, with examples and quotes. Version two will be much better than version one.
- Supply the judgment AI lacks
AI is encyclopedically smart - full of facts at large. But it has no opinion as to which facts are real, and which are not. AI tools may have logic, but they lack sound judgment. You have to be the human even when AI tools are doing most of your grunt work.
The best results come when you leverage AI’s strengths (processing large amounts of information quickly) while compensating for its weaknesses (lack of judgment, context awareness, and real-world understanding).
- Recognize and refine AI-generated content
This is critical. If you can’t tell when something sounds like AI, then your AI tool is using you, not the other way around. AI voice sounds impersonal and vanilla. Its tone makes one’s eyes glaze over.
Sensitize yourself to AI voice, so you can identify and refine AI-generated content. If you don’t, everyone who recognizes AI voice will know you’re just using raw AI output without adding your own expertise and perspective. Maybe it isn’t polite to laugh in your face, but they will definitely feel superior to you.
- Level up your AI skills
The standards have just gone up. If everyone has the same tools at their disposal, then everyone has the opportunity to become far more productive. Which means you have to get really good at using your AI tools to avoid getting left behind.
The most successful professionals won’t be those who simply use AI, but those who use it with sophistication and discernment.
The AI washer: A cautionary tale
In 1937, Maytag Corporation introduced its first fully automated washing machine. It washed, rinsed, and spun soiled clothing from start to finish, without a human hand. The water entered the washer and exited on its own. Let’s call this machine “AI washer.”
AI washer was supposed to save women tremendous hours of household work, and it ultimately did. But there were some unintended consequences:
It tied women more closely to household work than ever before. Doing the wash became a no-excuses chore. It was so easy! Why wouldn’t women just keep doing it?
It became environmentally unsound. Because washing was so easy, people started washing a LOT of stuff, soiled or not. Water usage increased dramatically, and detergents became harsher since users were machines not human hands.
It still had its limits. You couldn’t simply throw clothes into the wash and expect the machine to know what to do. You still had to sort the clothes, choose the water temperature and detergent, then handle the finished laundry. These steps remained with the human.
Standards for women went way up. Since they didn’t have to spend hours on the wash, they were expected to do more. Work outside the home. Look amazing. Become fantastic cooks. A lot more responsibilities landed on their plates.
Like AI washer, modern AI tools will do the same things. They will tie you, the office worker, closer to your computer than ever before. You will consume enormous computing power to run your AI tools. And you’ll still have to manage the AI to complete your work.
Because just like the “automatic” washing machine had no judgment about how to actually make clean clothes, your AI tools have no judgment about how to do good work. That responsibility rests solely with you, and you will find yourself asked to produce increasingly larger volumes of higher quality work.
Welcome to the AI-enabled workplace. Master your tools before they master you.
Originally published in Inc.