Use AI to Get Better at Using AI

Most people use AI in one direction.

They ask a question. AI gives them an answer. They decide whether they like it.

But there’s a much more useful way to work.

Use AI to help you use AI.

Instead of treating ChatGPT, Copilot or Claude purely as the machine that produces the final answer, use it as a coach, critic, prompt adviser and thinking partner along the way.

It sounds slightly circular. In practice, it can dramatically improve the quality of what you get back.

Stop trying to write the perfect prompt

One of the biggest barriers I see in AI training is people worrying about how to phrase their prompt.

They know roughly what they want, but they are unsure what information AI needs.

The obvious solution is to ask AI.

You can start with something as simple as:

I need to prepare a proposal for a potential client. Before you help me write it, what information do you need from me?

Now AI is helping to construct the task rather than simply responding to an incomplete instruction.

You can go further:

Here is the prompt I was going to use. Critique it and tell me what is missing before you answer it.

Or:

Ask me up to five questions that would help you produce a significantly better result.

Suddenly, prompt writing becomes a conversation rather than a test.

Ask AI to improve its own work

This is one of the simplest techniques I teach, yet it is surprisingly underused.

Don’t assume the first answer is the finished answer.

Ask AI to review what it has produced.

For example:

Review your answer critically. What are its three biggest weaknesses?

Then:

Rewrite it to address those weaknesses.

Or ask it to evaluate the response against specific criteria:

Score this proposal from 1 to 10 for clarity, persuasiveness and credibility. Explain each score and then improve anything below 8.

You are effectively introducing a quality-control stage into the conversation.

That doesn’t mean AI’s judgement is automatically correct. It means you have another way of exposing weaknesses before you decide what to use.

Get AI to suggest the best approach

Sometimes the challenge isn’t the prompt. It’s knowing what AI could do with the task in the first place.

Rather than immediately asking it to carry out a piece of work, describe the situation.

For example:

I organise a monthly networking event. I have attendee information, feedback forms, email correspondence and previous promotional posts. Suggest ten useful ways I could use AI to save time or improve the event.

This moves AI from answering a question to helping identify opportunities.

It’s particularly useful when you are staring at a repetitive piece of work and thinking, “There must be a better way of doing this.”

There often is.

Ask AI which AI approach to use

Not every task needs the same method.

You might need a straightforward chat. Another task might be better suited to a Project, an agent, a scheduled prompt, a spreadsheet analysis or a workflow involving several tools.

AI can help you make that choice.

Try:

I need to achieve the following outcome. Recommend the simplest AI approach that would work. Explain what I should do manually, what AI should do and where human checking is essential.

That final part matters.

The goal isn’t to automate everything. It’s to decide intelligently where AI genuinely helps.

Turn good results into reusable instructions

Once you’ve had a particularly productive conversation, don’t just close it and start again next time.

Ask:

Analyse our conversation and create a reusable prompt that would help me achieve a similar result in future.

Or:

Turn the approach we have just used into a step-by-step workflow that another member of my team could follow.

You can even ask:

Which parts of my instructions seemed to make the biggest difference to the quality of your answers?

That turns individual experimentation into something repeatable.

For teams, this is particularly valuable. Good AI practice stops being locked inside one person’s chat history and starts becoming organisational knowledge.

Use AI to challenge you, not just agree with you

There is another side to this.

AI assistants can be remarkably agreeable.

If you present an idea confidently, there is a danger that you receive a polished explanation of why your idea is brilliant rather than a serious examination of whether it actually is.

So explicitly invite disagreement.

Try:

Act as a constructive sceptic. Identify the assumptions I’m making and the strongest arguments against this idea.

Or:

What could make this fail?

Or even:

If you had to persuade me not to proceed with this plan, what would you say?

For strategic work, this can be considerably more valuable than another page of suggestions.

AI can also teach you how it works

When you get a surprisingly good result, investigate it.

Ask what information made the biggest difference.

When you get a poor result, investigate that too.

Ask:

Why might my instructions have produced this result, and how should I change them next time?

This creates a useful feedback loop.

Prompt. Result. Critique. Improve. Reuse.

Over time, you stop simply getting better answers.

You get better at working with AI.

There is an important catch

None of this removes the need for human judgement.

AI can confidently recommend a poor approach. It can critique an accurate answer and make it worse. It can identify a supposed weakness that isn’t really a weakness at all.

And asking AI to check AI is not independent verification.

For important factual, financial, legal, medical or safety-related work, appropriate human expertise and reliable sources still matter.

Think of AI as another pair of eyes, not the final authority.

The most useful AI question might be the one you haven’t asked

We spend a lot of time asking what AI can do for us.

A useful habit is to turn that around:

“How can you help me get better at doing this with you?”

That one question can uncover better prompts, better workflows, missing information, alternative approaches and weaknesses you hadn’t spotted.

You don’t need to become an expert prompt engineer.

You need to become good at having a productive conversation.

And increasingly, AI itself can help you do that.

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Discover practical ways to use ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude to improve your prompts, critique AI output, identify better workflows and get more useful results from AI.

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