I am writing a trend report on the subject and this post is a way of exploring the background and doing the research: Future of HumAIn Work. I co-authored this post with Bing Chat which I also wrote about here if you want to understand how that works: Features that delight with ChatGPT Outlook Edge Bing.

According to Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index Report for which 31,000 full-time employed or self-employed workers across 31 markets between February 1, 2023, and March 14, 2023 were surveyed, there are seven critical skills when it comes to working with AI. Here they are below in the exec summary, scroll to the bottom of the page:

In this post I want to focus on two.

Analytical judgement

With AI we need to take a trust but verify approach. It means that we should not blindly trust the outputs or decisions of AI systems, but first verify their validity, reliability, and accuracy through various methods.

The three main methods for verifying are using generative AI detectors, using provenance information, and using common sense and critical thinking. 

Of the three, it is only the last that is purely human and the one that coincides with this first critical skill highlighted in the report and that I want to emphasise.

The Work Trend Index reports says this for describing analytical judgement: Determine when to leverage an AI capability instead of a human capability.

I think it is much more about using our unique human faculties to Sensemake and judge the results to see how this can fit in with our thinking to move it forward – I wrote about that here: Making sense of SenseMaking – the AI version.

AI delegation (prompts)

For me its not just about the art of the prompt and effective prompt engineering which is a concept that involves embedding the description of the task that the AI is supposed to do in the input, such as a question (assuming we are not dealing with code or image generation).

Prompt engineering helps to guide the AI model in generating high-quality and relevant texts and is an important skill if we are to get the right answers because if you get the question wrong, the answer will be wrong, or less valuable.

So what is crucial is also basic communication skills. Funnily enough, it’s the one thing both business decision makers and employees agree on from one work trend index study. There have been many instances of disagreement, the most notable being around perceptions of productivity between remote and office work and these two stakeholder groups – results are diametrically opposed. Not so communications.

You are going to need to be able to write good questions or prompts and then read and understand the responses well, from a pure communications point of view. Assuming you are going to use content generated through AI for different purposes, you really will have to know what good likes like before passing it on, for whatever purposes.

Ideally, you bring your unique human capabilities into it and make it even better. In a world inundated already with garbage messaging and set to worsen with bad AI generated content, this skill is going to reign supreme.