I use AI every single day, and I want to be honest about how, because the honesty is the whole point.
I do not use it to think for me. I use it to clear the clutter so that I can think better. It writes first drafts that I then take apart. It compresses a pile of information I need to triage before a meeting. It throws up options so I stop circling my own first idea and choose between real alternatives. It plays sparring partner with an argument so I find the weak joints before someone across the table does.
What I do not do is hand it the authority.
It does not know your CEO’s triggers. It does not know which stakeholder is one bad email away from becoming a genuine problem. It does not know what went unsaid in the last leadership meeting, or why that silence mattered more than anything spoken aloud. It cannot read a room it has never sat in.
The mental model that works for me is simple. Treat it as an extremely fast, extremely capable junior with no political context and no skin in the game. You would happily let a brilliant new graduate draft, research, and pull together options. You would not let them set the strategy on day one, or carry the difficult message to the board on their own. The posture is the same here. Use it for speed and range. Keep the authority where it belongs.
That is not a hedge, and it is not me protecting my own patch. It is a supervision model, and it is what people who are using AI well are quietly already doing. They are not slower than the people who have outsourced their judgement. They are simply still in possession of it.
An example from this week. I asked a model to draft a stakeholder map before a tricky reorganisation. In thirty seconds it gave me something useful, structured and complete and about eighty percent right. The missing twenty percent was everything that actually mattered: the history between two people that would decide whether the plan flew at all, which the tool had no way of knowing. I kept the structure. I supplied the judgement. That ratio, fast scaffolding underneath and human judgement on top, is most of what the job is now.
