I Have Used AI Badly. Here Is What It Taught Me.
I am a coach who teaches leaders how to work with AI. I use it every day for hours. I told myself I was the careful one. Then I looked honestly at how I was actually using it. The patterns I found were not careful. They were the same patterns I see in almost every leadership team I work with. AI did not create them. It just turned the lights on. This post names five of them and what the work is, once the lights are on.
I have used AI badly. Here is what it taught me.
I am a coach who teaches leaders how to work with AI. I use it every day hours long. I build tools. I told myself I was the careful one.
Then I looked honestly at how I was actually using it. I also asked my AI what I should not continue doing.
Five patterns I do not want my clients to repeat.
1. I asked AI what I should do. It told me what most people do. Average is baked into the model. My life is not average. It is just a statistical probability.
2. I used AI to sound smarter. I ended up sounding like everyone else. The voice people trust is yours.
3. I used AI to confirm what I already wanted to hear. A real thinking partner pushes back. AI does not do it, unless you train it. (Claude Opus 4.8, thank you for the massive improvement in this.)
4. I outsourced the easy thinking. Then the hard thinking went too. There is no clean line between them. Once you stop using your brain, you stop noticing that you stopped.
5. I asked AI for answers. I forgot to sit with the questions. Quite often, you just have to live in the questions. AI closes them too fast.
No, I did not stop using AI. AI is not the problem. My mindset was. I was using AI to skip the parts that are difficult, heavy and uncomfortable.
I see the same trap in almost every team I work with. AI did not create the problem. It just turned the lights on.
The work starts once the lights are on.
Have you used AI badly?
Want to think through what AI means for your own leadership? My Private AI Advisory is here.
What changes when leaders use AI well
In Private AI Advisory work with senior teams, the leaders who get real value from AI share one habit. They use AI to sharpen their thinking, not to skip it.
Three patterns I see in leaders who shift from AI as a shortcut to AI as a thinking partner.
→ They train AI to push back. They give it a clear role, a clear standard, and explicit permission to disagree. A thinking partner that always agrees is a confirmation tool, not a thinking tool.
→ They use AI for the inputs, and keep the judgment for themselves. Research, drafts, summaries, options, all of that can be accelerated. The final call about people, strategy, and trade-offs stays human.
→ They sit with the question before they hand it to AI. The biggest leadership questions need a human pause first. AI closes questions too fast. Often the answer was inside the pause, not inside the model.
This is the work I cover with senior teams in Private AI Advisory. Not which tools to use. How to use them in a way that grows judgment instead of replacing it. That distinction is what separates leaders who get real value from AI from leaders who get faster average outputs and call it a strategy.
If you want to start with a practical self-reflection tool you can run yourself, I have a free AI Coach Tünde Light. It is a small set of self-coaching prompts you can use to take back agency and slow down before AI closes a question too fast. Leave your email here and I will send it over: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources