How To Talk To AI

InnovationEnterprise TechHow To Talk To AIByBernard Marr,Contributor.Follow AuthorJun 10, 2026, 01:56am EDTTalking to AI well is becoming one of the most valuable business skills of the decade, because better questions lead to better thinking, clearer decisions and stronger results.Adobe StockArtificial intelligence may be the first technology in history that becomes more useful when we become better at being human.That was my big takeaway from speaking with Jamie Bartlett, author of How To Talk To AI. At first glance, the title sounds like a book about prompt engineering. In reality, it is about something much more interesting: how we think, how we communicate, how we make decisions and how easily we can be seduced by a machine that always sounds confident.For business leaders, this is a crucial shift. The question is moving beyond which AI tools to use and toward how we use them well. AI can help us write, research, summarize, debate, create and decide. Yet the value we get from it depends on the quality of our questions, the strength of our judgment and our willingness to challenge the answers we receive.Bartlett put it neatly in our conversation: “I don’t really think in terms of prompts. I think in terms of habits.”That is the right way to frame it. Prompting is a technique. Talking to AI well is a discipline.The First Skill Is Knowing When To Use AIOne of Bartlett’s most useful pieces of advice is also the easiest to ignore. Before using a language model, ask whether you need one.MORE FOR YOUHe said the first question should be, “Do I really need a language model?” It sounds simple, but it cuts to the heart of one of the biggest risks in business use of AI. Because these tools are so convenient, they can become our default response to every task.There is nothing wrong with using AI to summarize a long report. I do it. It can save enormous time, but we have to ask ourselves whether reading the report was part of the thinking. Sometimes a summary is enough. Some...