Six questions to discover how AI can augment you
AI can do a lot, but what should it be doing for you? Six questions to help you figure it out.
Picture this: You’re handed a machine with unimaginable power—something that could change the way you work, think, and create. And what’s the first thing most people ask?
What can it do?
Which is the wrong question entirely! Like building a rocket ship and using it to cross town for a cup of coffee. Technology without direction is just an expensive paperweight.
The real question—the only question—is what can it do for you? You don’t flip switches and hope for the best. You make assumptions, you experiment, and you understand what will actually make a difference in your world. Otherwise, you’ll end up spinning your wheels. Hell, maybe you feel like you’re already spinning your wheels.
Key Takeaways
AI isn’t just a tool—it’s a mirror that reflects the good and bad in our thinking
Instead of asking what AI can do, ask what it should do to enhance your workflow
Six questions will help you pinpoint where AI can be an amplifier for you
So how do we get this right? There are six questions we can use to plot our course. They’ve been instrumental in figuring out how I put AI to work for me. Answer them thoughtfully, and you’ll be headed straight for breakthroughs that matter. Skip them and well… do you need another paperweight?
AI as a mirror
I could argue the real value of AI is in how it reflects our own thinking back at us.
Every time you use AI, you’re giving it a window into your thought process. If AI keeps giving you generic results, it’s because you’re asking generic questions. If it struggles to give you useful insights, it might be because your own clarity around the problem is lacking. AI won’t magically fill in the gaps for you—it will expose them.
This is why AI is so powerful, and why it can also be frustrating. It forces you to be intentional. Every interaction is a chance to ask yourself:
Am I being clear about what I want?
Am I falling into rigid thinking, or am I open to new possibilities?
Am I using AI to reinforce my old patterns, or to push my creativity in new directions?
AI is only as good as the questions you ask it. When you use it deliberately, it becomes a partner in refining your own thinking—sharpening your insights, challenging your assumptions, and making you more aware of how you process information.
Six questions to discover how AI can augment you
Now, let’s get practical. Instead of trying to use AI everywhere, start with these six questions. They’ll help you find the areas where AI can remove friction, accelerate your work, and amplify your ideas.
1. What are my most time-consuming, repetitive, or tedious tasks?
Time is the one resource you can’t make more of, so where is yours slipping through the cracks? The tasks that drain hours but not creativity are quietly keeping your thoughts tucked into busy work.
The real insight here is about understanding the cost of keeping those tasks on your plate. Every minute spent on low-value work is a minute not spent on innovation or deep thinking. Worse, the mental clutter creates drag and forces energy to be misdirected.
When you answer this, it’s also helpful to ask, why is it tedious? Is it necessary? Where do things get clunky? The goal is to remove friction but there’s an opportunity to rethink the way you engage with your work.
Example: Instead of manually sorting emails every morning, categorize them by urgency and importance. In doing so, you can start your day with a clearer head and sharper focus. Because let’s be honest, almost anything beats sifting through an inbox.
2. What information do I regularly need to process and synthesize?
The real challenge isn’t having access to information—it’s knowing what to do with it. The modern world is drowning in information, all of which seem important. When you’re stuck sifting through details, the signal gets lost.
The key isn’t to process everything—it’s to pluck what’s actionable. AI can help filter out distractions and highlight the insights that matter, turning raw and random text into something actually useful. But this isn’t just about efficiency as much as clarity. The more time you spend buried in the tress, the less time you have to think critically about the forest.
Example: A product manager trying to make sense of thousands of customer reviews doesn’t need to read every single one. Instead, extract key themes—surfacing the biggest pain points and feature requests in minutes. This isn’t just faster; it allows for strategic, not reactive, responses.
3. What skills or knowledge gaps could AI help me bridge?
No one has time to master everything—but that can’t stop us from tackling work that demands new skills. AI can be a valuable tool to accelerate our ability to learn, and more importantly, apply.
AI won’t make you a great data analyst, marketer, or author (you have to do that yourself), but it can give you a working knowledge. On the macro level, you can easily get an overview of a topic. On the micro, it lets us move forward instead of getting stuck. All of which shortens the learning curve between “I don’t know how” and “I know what to do next.”
Example: A marketer with no formal statistics training doesn’t need to put their campaign analysis on hold until they’ve mastered Excel. AI can break down performance trends, flag anomalies, and highlight actionable insights—allowing them to make data-driven decisions while they build their analytics skills.
4. Where do I struggle with communication—written, visual, or verbal?
You have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t communicate them effectively, they lose impact. Whether it’s refining your writing, structuring your presentations, or speaking with confidence, the challenge is that we don’t usually get feedback until it’s too late.
This is where AI can serve as a coach. It can help you structure complex ideas, adjust tone, and even analyze delivery patterns in speech. AI won’t replace authenticity, but it can help land your message, making you a stronger communicator in the process.
Example: Instead of guessing (or not considering) how a presentation will come across, someone preparing for a high-stakes chat can get some analysis on pacing, tone, and clarity, offering real-time feedback. And that’s not to consider the possibilities with AI voice capabilities (where you could feed AI a dry run of your presentation).
5. What are the most complex or strategic decisions I make?
High-stakes decisions are about considering the right variables. AI can help to model different outcomes, identify blind spots, and provide alternative perspectives. The real value being we can expand our analytical view of the problem. And when we can do that, we can cycle through more scenarios and possibilities before we commit to action.
Another problem is, we default to what we think we know. Cognitive biases, limited data, and gut instinct all shape decision-making. The wrong assumptions can be costly, and AI (in particular chat) gives us the ability to test assumptions. With a large grain of salt.
Example: A startup founder weighing an expansion strategy isn’t just deciding between two markets. AI can analyze competitor moves, economic conditions, and shifting consumer sentiment to reveal potential risks and unconsidered opportunities. All while helping you question and answer your way into a data-backed decision.
6. What content do I create most often, and where does AI fit into that workflow?
Nothing kills the momentum of creativity faster than getting stuck on small, repetitive details. Writing, designing, brainstorming, they all require an open flow of ideas—but too often, that flow gets interrupted.
AI should serve as a creative partner, offering a fresh angle, sparking new ideas, or handling the heavy lifting on parts of the process that don’t require your unique vision.
The obvious next question is how can we remove the friction that slows us down?
Example: A novelist wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) let AI write their book. But when it comes to developing character backstories, brainstorming world-building elements, or generating name ideas, AI can provide creative input without diluting their originality. It keeps them focused on the story rather than getting bogged down in the details.
A prompt to help answer these questions
And I hope you saw it coming, but of course AI can lend you a hand with answering the six questions above. Here’s a structured prompt with one placeholder and one variable to do just that:
Given my role as {ROLE}, answer the following question:
"[Insert question]"
Provide a long list of practical, actionable ideas and next steps tailored to my work. Please do not provide any specific AI tools unless I ask for them.
ROLE = "[Author, product manager, salesperson, etc.]"The goal is to make AI work with you—not just for you. The trick is knowing where it helps rather than hinders. If it feels like a collaborator, it helps. If it feels like a crutch, it hinders. The best question isn’t what can AI do? It’s what can AI make possible for me?