Why most people suck at AI (and how to not be one of them)

Sharp questions + clear thinking = actual AI leverage

If you're applying AI like everyone else, you're already playing the hardest game.

Most people treat AI like a magic button. Plug in a prompt, cross your fingers, hope for genius output. Then they wonder why their results are mediocre at best.

Here’s what I’ve learned after months of watching teams—inside Microsoft and across my network—struggle with AI adoption:

The technology isn’t the bottleneck. People are.

The real limit? Too few people can ask good questions and think clearly about the answers.

I’m willing to die on this hill: most of the workforce operates at the level of first-order thinking. They react to what’s directly in front of them. They handle surface-level tasks. But they rarely ask, “What happens next?”—let alone “What happens after that?”

Second-order thinking is what separates people who are actually productive with AI from people using it to generate cocktail recipes based on their Hogwarts house.

I see this gap everywhere.

Engineers who can write code but can’t probe past a basic prompt. Creative thinkers who ask sharp questions but drift when processing complex answers. The rare few who can do both? They pull 10x the value from the same tools.

Good questioning isn’t about sounding smart.

It’s about seeing the real problem, breaking it into parts, and focusing on what matters.

Clear thinking means cutting through AI’s noise to extract what’s useful—especially when the output’s long, vague, or wrong.

I’ve seen enterprise projects crumble the moment a strong lead takes a week off.
Status meetings stall. Decisions get delayed. No one knows what’s next.

Not because the work was hard—but because clear thinking wasn’t built into the process.

The project ran on one person’s questions, not a system.

The people who crush it with AI don’t treat it like a vending machine. They treat it like a thinking partner.

They probe. Refine. Stay focused on outcomes.
They spot hallucinations. They ask better follow-ups.
They think through what happens next.

It’s not about prompt hacks.
It’s about mental clarity.

The sharper your thinking, the more leverage these tools give you.

Whether you're writing, coding, or designing workflows—your results rise and fall with your ability to ask good questions and interpret answers with discipline.

Here’s the upside: most people never develop these skills.

Which means the advantage goes to those who do.