Laura Bruscagin Schwantes

One of my favorite ways to use AI is surprisingly simple. I don't ask it to give me answers. I ask it to improve my thinking and be my critical thinking partner. A framework I come back to often has three steps: 1. Build knowledge. "Explain this concept from different perspectives." 2. Challenge ideas. "What assumptions am I making? Where could I be wrong? Give me the strongest counterargument." 3. Calibrate decisions. "What evidence am I missing? What risks haven't I considered? What would change your recommendation?" Try it and notice what changes. AI isn't about replacing judgment but helping us exercise it. That's a subtle but important shift.

Prompting is one of the most valuable AI skills you can develop. But I don't think it's the most important one. Prompting only becomes truly powerful when it's paired with another skill: asking better questions. You can master prompt engineering and still use AI to avoid thinking or you can use a simple prompt to think more deeply than you would have on your own. Most people ask AI to produce, which is good and saves us time. But, the best AI users ask it to provoke. Instead of asking it to write the answer, ask it to strengthen your thinking, challenge your assumptions and offer a different perspective. The first approach treats AI as an answer machine. The second treats it as a critical thinking partner. When we only use AI to generate answers, we risk skipping the part where learning actually happens: confusion, comparison, doubt, reflection, and revision.

Over the past few weeks, I've been reading a lot about AI literacy and how AI is changing the way we think, learn, and work. One study particularly caught my attention. Researchers at Microsoft Research found that people who have greater confidence in AI tend to engage in less critical thinking. Interestingly, the study also suggests that critical thinking doesn't disappear when we use AI — it shifts. Instead of generating every idea ourselves, we spend more time evaluating, questioning, and refining AI outputs... if we choose to. And I think that's the key. Right now, most of us aren't choosing to. We've been treating AI as a machine that thinks for us. It should be a machine that thinks with us. Those are two very different things. When we ask AI to write an email, summarize a meeting, solve a problem, or make a decision, we're often outsourcing the thinking itself. Sometimes that's exactly what we want. But if it becomes our default mode, we stop exercising the very cognitive muscles we're trying to augment. Lately, I've been adding one sentence to almost every prompt: "Act as my critical thinking partner. Challenge my assumptions. Don't optimize for agreeing with me." The conversations become much more interesting. Less validation and more thinking. Study: www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

The tool an expert uses to make their work easier is not the same tool a novice should use to learn how to become an expert. Think about it. Recent research from MIT Media Lab found that students using AI for writing tasks showed lower levels of brain engagement and weaker memory retention compared to students who completed the same tasks independently. Researchers have also identified concerns around cognitive offloading: the tendency to outsource complex thinking processes to technology instead of developing them ourselves. I can use AI to help me draft a proposal because I already understand strategy, storytelling, communication, and pricing. The tool speeds up work I already know how to do. But if I had never learned those skills in the first place, AI could easily become a shortcut around learning rather than a support for learning. That distinction matters.

Continuing my thoughts on AI and education, I truly believe the more AI we use, the more teachers we need. Learning has always been more than transferring information. A good teacher does not simply explain concepts. They build confidence and create belonging. They notice when a student is struggling, they adapt, motivate and connect. There is an emotional dimension to learning that no chatbot can replicate. Recently, while preparing a proposal for a client in the education sector, I caught myself thinking about how much time AI saves me in operational work and I wondered if teachers were already using it in the same way. Not to teach for them, but to free them from repetitive tasks so they can focus on the human side of teaching. I asked two friends. One works at an AI-powered learning platform that helps teachers create lesson plans, assessments, accessibility adaptations, and classroom materials. The other is a teacher. The developer told me teachers consistently report that they have more time to focus on relationships and learning experiences which has in return made their students more engaged. My teacher friend gave an even simpler answer: "We can't run away from AI. That's pointless. We need to learn how to use it as a tool, not as something that thinks for us. And we need to use it so we can prepare our students for this new era." And I think that captures the challenge perfectly.

Shall we talk about AI in education? I spent five years working for an NGO focused on inclusive education and the core question we kept coming back to was simple: how do we remove barriers so more people can learn, in ways that work for them? That is why I find AI both exciting and concerning. On one hand, it has enormous potential to remove barriers. It can adapt content, personalize explanations, support accessibility, and help students learn in ways that work for them. But it also creates new barriers. Access to AI tools and literacy is unevenly distributed and so are the risks. Students are using tools that can influence how they think, what they learn, and even what information they are exposed to. Yet many schools still don’t teach them how to use these tools critically. There is also an important question we are not discussing enough: at what point should AI use start? Just like we have age guidelines for social media, we need to start thinking about age-appropriate exposure to AI, and how to introduce it in a way that supports, rather than replaces, the development of critical thinking skills. The conversation cannot be limited to cheating. It needs to include bias, misinformation, cognitive development, digital literacy, and equitable access. The answer is not banning AI and at this point, this may not even be possible. The answer is teaching AI. The same way my generation learned how to use computers in school, this generation needs to learn how to use AI critically, ethically, and responsibly. Think about it. We don't hand a child a bicycle and expect them to figure it out alone. We teach them step by step, explain the risks, add training wheels if necessary, supervise the process, and gradually give them more freedom. Why should it be any different with AI literacy?

For years, the marketing industry sold productivity disguised as creativity. AI changes that. When execution becomes abundant, the value shifts elsewhere to perspective, cultural intuition, knowing what not to say and to defending an idea that doesn't fit the brief because your experience tells you it's the right one. Today I learned that four well-known Brazilian marketing leaders have launched what they call the world's first "lights-off creative company". The idea is simple: let AI handle the operational work like adapting, versioning, formatting, reviewing and producing at scale, while humans focus on what machines can't replicate: creativity. Maybe the question isn't whether AI will replace creative work. It's whether we'll finally stop confusing execution with creativity. And if execution is no longer the differentiator, what becomes our real creative advantage in the age of AI?