4 questions that tell you if AI is making you worse

Four questions that tell you if AI is making you dumber. I use these with every client to make sure we are using AI to help us think, not think for us.

Question one. What did you do before the tool existed. If you cannot describe the manual version clearly, you have already lost the skill.

Question two. What does the tool do for you now. Name the exact steps it handles.

Question three. Do you still practise any of those steps yourself. If the answer is no, and it usually is, you are outsourcing a skill you used to own.

Question four. What happens if the tool disappears tomorrow. If the answer is "I would be stuck," you have got a dependency, not a tool.

A client in Cork automated her entire proposal process with AI. Twelve months in, I asked her to write one from scratch. She could not get past the first page without reaching for Claude. She was producing higher-quality proposals faster, but the underlying skill was gone.

AI should handle the repetitive work so you can focus on the work that actually needs your brain. The formatting, the scheduling, the first-draft grunt work, let AI do all of that. But the thinking, the client judgement, the decisions where being wrong actually costs money, keep doing those yourself.

Run the four questions on one process you have automated. If question four makes you uncomfortable, spend thirty minutes this week doing that task by hand. Keep the skill alive while the tool handles the volume.