Frame your interaction with AI as if you're onboarding a new employee. Providing deep context, clear expectations, and even a mental "salary" forces you to take the task seriously, leading to vastly superior outputs compared to casual prompting.

Users who treat AI as a collaborator—debating with it, challenging its outputs, and engaging in back-and-forth dialogue—see superior outcomes. This mindset shift produces not just efficiency gains, but also higher quality, more innovative results compared to simply delegating discrete tasks to the AI.

AI is not a 'set and forget' solution. An agent's effectiveness directly correlates with the amount of time humans invest in training, iteration, and providing fresh context. Performance will ebb and flow with human oversight, with the best results coming from consistent, hands-on management.

A powerful workflow is to explicitly instruct your AI to act as a collaborative thinking partner—asking questions and organizing thoughts—while strictly forbidding it from creating final artifacts. This separates the crucial thinking phase from the generative phase, leading to better outcomes.

Humans mistakenly believe they are giving AIs goals. In reality, they are providing a 'description of a goal' (e.g., a text prompt). The AI must then infer the actual goal from this lossy, ambiguous description. Many alignment failures are not malicious disobedience but simple incompetence at this critical inference step.

Don't view AI tools as just software; treat them like junior team members. Apply management principles: 'hire' the right model for the job (People), define how it should work through structured prompts (Process), and give it a clear, narrow goal (Purpose). This mental model maximizes their effectiveness.

The most effective use of AI isn't full automation, but "hybrid intelligence." This framework ensures humans always remain central to the decision-making process, with AI serving in a complementary, supporting role to augment human intuition and strategy.

A powerful framework for the human-AI partnership: AI provides the "intellectual capacity" (data, options, research), but the salesperson must serve as the "intellectual activator." Their irreplaceable role is applying strategic judgment and critical thinking to activate the information AI provides.

The skills of setting clear goals, understanding resource (model) strengths, and defining processes are the same for managing people and AI agents. Being a great manager makes you a great AI user, as both require clarifying outcomes and marshalling resources to achieve them.