How I Use AI to Amplify This Skill And Be Ridiculously Useful at Work

Human-first thinking, AI-supported doing

Author

Ross Stevenson
April 1st, 2025

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 TODAY’S THOUGHTS ☠️

Hey there 👋,

It’s April.

I know you know that, but still, how did that happen?

Anyway, my time crisis aside, I’m super excited about todays edition. I mean, I’m excited about every edition but right now, I get the thrills from today’s topic.

We’re going to explore what I think is one of the most underrated skills in life and how AI can amplify it’s power.

Get your tea or beverage of choice ready, 🍵.

We've got lots to discuss!

P.S. You’re app might clip this edition due to size, if so, read the full edition in all its glory in your browser.

 TL;DR 📰

  • The most underrated skill you should build

  • I challenged one L&D team with a weird question to uncover real value

  • How to work with AI reasoning models on big tasks

TOGETHER WITH SANA

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Whether it’s answering a complex question, reinforcing a skill, or summarising critical information, learning becomes part of everyday work.

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 THE BIG THOUGHT 👀

How I Use AI to Amplify This Skill And Be Ridiculously Useful at Work

I love me some smart visuals

I believe this is one of the most underrated skills you can have in today’s world:

→ The ability to distil complex information, humanise it, and make it useful for others.

Might sound simple, but it's not easy to do

I’ve built a career out of this.

Whether it’s analysing long reports, navigating those sleep-inducing corporate strategy decks, or breaking down that latest 'think piece' into something that actually makes sense.

This is the skill that makes you invaluable.

And now, with AI, this ability becomes even more powerful and sort of accessible. If you're smart about it.

That's what I'm sharing today.

(Btw, you can watch everything I share today in the video below. If you prefer visual and audio thoughts, this is for you).

If you’re thinking “Tell me more”, fret not.

Here’s a mini step by step guide to enhancing your human insights with AI that you can use immediately.

Step 1: Do a Human review

Yes...use your brain.

Shocking, I know.

Modern business life finds us drowning in white papers from McKinsey, HBR articles saved in 27 open tabs (yes, I have a problem), and PDFs full of charts no one understands.

There’s value in all of it, somewhere.

If you're anything like me, you save some screenshots and highlight notes to share with your audience. Wether that reaches them is another question.

AI can help you to collate, build on and refine what you want to get across.

The problem is most people just use AI tools to craft basic summaries that parrot the original text without any real context for your audience.

That’s not the move!

Content is worth very little without context. Something AI is teaching us more by the day.

What you want to focus on before even touching AI is:

  • What topics are relevant to your audience?

  • What is your (yes your) key take on the topic?

  • What do you want your audience to walk away with?

Use your human intelligence here.

That means (at least partially) reading the thing, digest it and decide what matters.

Then (and only then) we can go talk to your local neighbourhood AI tool about the ideas, insights and messages you want to solidify.

Step 2: Use AI after you’ve done the thinking to enhance your insights

Once you’ve got clarity on the topic and your key take, that’s the time to bring AI into the mix.

Personally, I’m a big fan of NotebookLM for this job.

I chuck in all the stuff I’ve been reading, add my own notes, and use it to help me cross-check ideas, open up different perspectives, and challenge my thinking.

But here’s the rule: AI is the co-pilot, not the captain.

This is the whole point of doing the human review first. You go in with clarity on your POV and use AI to help shape that.

So, that means working together to crystallise your insights, not relying on AI to reveal all, cause it won't

There are loads of other tools you can use too:

  • Gemini

  • ChatGPT

  • DeepSeek

  • Claude

Take your pick.

The point is to use them to elevate your thinking not outsource it.

Step 3: Refine your insight for humans, not AI

Before you share any of those freshly generated AI takes on your notes - hold fire!

Now is the time to refine your information into a structure that makes sense for your audience

This is where most people drop the ball.

They'll share a wall of text or copy-paste what a tool gave them.

Please, don't do that.

Instead, ask:

What format serves this best? (A one-pager? A short email? A voice note for the team Slack?)

Once you've defined this, you can use AI tools to help structure your writing but your brain needs to lead the way.

Ask yourself:

  • Why should people care about this?

  • What’s my core point?

  • What’s the value in this for them?

  • What will they learn and how can that be used?

If you can answer that, you’re already 10 steps ahead of most.

This is still what makes this very much a human powered process with AI support.

Final Thoughts

This is one of the ways I get real value with AI.

Don't get it twisted, AI doesn’t replace human thinking.

The best insights come from your unique perspective, and AI can help you refine, structure, and elevate that perspective.

That’s the person everyone wants to work with.

Let's recap on what we've covered:

  1. Identify a useful topic, establish your key take = your human review

  2. Gather all that context with your sources and share with AI to validate, challenge and expand on your ideas

  3. Bring all that together in a format that makes sense for your audience

→ If you’ve found this helpful, please consider sharing it wherever you hang out online, tag me in and share your thoughts.

Till next time, you stay classy, learning friend!

PS… If you’re enjoying the newsletter, will you take 4 seconds to forward this edition to a friend? It goes a long way in helping me grow the newsletter (and cut through our industry BS with actionable insights).

And one more thing, I’d love your input on how to make the newsletter even more useful for you!

So please leave a comment with:

  1. Ideas you’d like covered in future editions

  2. Your biggest takeaway from this edition

I read & reply to every single one of them!

 👀 ICYMI (In case you missed it!)

  1. You probably have everything your company needs but they don’t know it exists

  2. My AI + Human workflow that turns long videos into actionable insights

  3. The weird question I asked one L&D team that made them transform how they saw their products and services

  4. ChatGPT can finally create images with correctly spelled words, and it can continue to steal your favourite artists work to turn into anything you want. Both an impressive and concerning release. Good news for any ID’s, you can now create sets of consistent images 🙌

  5. Working with AI boosts performance and leads to better emotional experiences, says Harvard Business School and LinkedIn’s resident AI commentator, Ethan Mollick. The team studied 776 Proctor and Gamble employees to understand how AI is now embedded as a Cybernetic team mate (Get an audio overview of the research below ↓).

  6. Does AI help or harm skill-building? That’s what I’m sharing at my next online keynote with the team at Datacamp. Join us on April 9th at 11 am ET.

 VIDEO THOUGHTS 💾

How to Work with AI Reasoning Models

Not all AI models are built the same.

Some are designed to think step-by-step and handle ambiguity, while others focus on speed, efficiency, and quick content generation.

So how do you choose the right model for your task?

In this video, we break down the difference between reasoning models and GPT models, show you real-world examples, and share 7 prompting tips to help you get better results from advanced tools like O1, O3-mini, DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini, and more.

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