By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-03-10 11:00:00
Training teams to use AI at work has given me a front-row seat to a new kind of professional divide.
Some people leave everything to the machine and stop thinking. Others won’t touch it at all.
But there is a third group. You’ll learn to approach AI critically and treat it like a smart, enthusiastic intern who needs to be guided and supported to do its best work.
The difference? It’s rarely technical skill. It’s curiosity. A willingness to experiment, do things wrong and find out what AI can actually do.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
Most people fail with AI because they don’t understand what it actually is
The people I’ve worked with tend to vacillate between extremes: treating AI as an all-knowing oracle or dismissing it entirely after a mistake.
Current AI has as much in common with the human brain as a bird has with an A380. Both can fly, but that’s where the similarity ends. Large language models simply predict words based on patterns in their…
