For What Tasks Should You Use AI?

If you're a knowledge worker, or planning to become one, I highly recommend that you get really comfortable with using AI.

But figuring out how, let alone when, to use AI is a big challenge that no one really teaches us. Which is why in this newsletter, I want to take you through my thoughts on how to use AI after 100's of hours of usage, reading AI books, trying out LLM models like GPT and Gemini and listening to the most skilled professionals takes on skill development in the 21'st century.

Lets start with the fundamentals that we have to acknowledge:

AI Can Do Basically Everything

GPT and Gemini are now scary good at many of the crucial tasks for the knowledge worker.

For reference, a knowledge worker is someone whose job involves turning information into value. Think web designers, business consultants and teachers and basically anywhone who works primarily with their brain instead of their muscles.

Skills like writing, specialized knowledge and communication can now be heavily assisted by AI. Using AI can basically transform an entire role from operational (doing something) to a strategic one (deciding how things should be done).

This has the potential to delegate boring work to AI, and free up lots more time to be used for:

• Planning
• Seeing the bigger picture
• Higher leverage activities

But AI can also make us worse at the skills we value and see as critical to our job.

This is the curse of technology. Few people know how to navigate on a physical map. But on the other hand, we don't need to anymore because of GPS.

So, with all of these options and possibilities (and risks) comes the natural question:

When Should You Use AI?

To decide what skills you should delegate to AI, I use a heuristic I recently heard about.

In short, think about weightlifting vs using a forklift - And the tasks you have to do as lifting different kinds of weights. This frames your skills as specific muscles that get stronger with practice.

With this analogy, it becomes clear to see that only using AI for everything or never using it for anything are suboptimal strategies.

Only using AI would leave your own muscles weak, but never using it would not allow you to do certain tasks with the same speed as other people who are using the fortlift.

Now, some tasks you'll be fine with outsourcing to AI. It can do the heavier lifts, and you might prioritize your time to get better at other skills than reading a long text document to find the 3 values that you're looking for (AI does this easily, it's like the forklift).

But some skills you want to maintain.

• Writing a clear email to your colleague?
• Summarizing the information relevant to your manager?
• Presenting your vision for how a problem can be solved?

These are skills that most people want to keep, despite AI's capacity to help us with them - Or that is the case I want to make to you.

The best way to decide is to simply ask yourself which skills are most crucial to your job, and have the most deep impact in how you work and think?

If you're struggling to come up with these, here are my thoughts on which skills that I want to protect and develop, despite AI's current and future ability to technically do it better than me.

The Skills I'm leaving to AI (And Which Ones I'm not)

The 3 skills I want to get better at (independent from using AI to do it):

1. Writing
2. Coding
3. Communication

I believe that these three skills will never stop being valuable. They also have the added benefit that getting good at these skills fundamentally changes how I solve problems, irrespective if I use AI to implement the solution or not.

Writing makes my speech clear and concise, coding makes me see unique opportunities for software implementations and communication makes me be able to sell others on my ideas.

Wether we like it or not, some skills are getting continuously devalued due to the efficiency of AI. It is then up to us to identify the skills that AI is unlikely to compete with us on, and then try to get really good at them.

What skills do you want to keep in the age of AI? Let me know by commenting down below!

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