5 Ways to Think With AI (Not Just Talk to It)
Use AI as a thinking partner by delegating with context, researching through dialogue, and applying the human judgment that turns output into useful work.
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Use AI to Extend Your Thinking
The most important AI skill is not finding a perfect prompt. It is learning how to think with an assistant that can question, organize, search, and generate options at speed. That requires a few changes in how we approach work.
AI remains a tool, not a person. Yet it can be useful to interact with it as a capable colleague: give it context, ask it to challenge assumptions, and use the exchange to develop a stronger answer. The goal is not to turn off human thought. It is to extend it.
1. Move From Solo Thinking to Co-Intelligence
Many projects begin with one person trying to plan, research, and solve every part alone. AI creates another option. Bring it into the early thinking, ask it for counterarguments, and use it to explore possibilities you might miss.
That does not mean accepting the first response. A useful colleague can be wrong, incomplete, or overly confident. The value comes from having another perspective available whenever you need it, then applying your own experience and discernment to what it produces.
2. Move From Prompt Collecting to Clear Delegation
Prompt libraries can be helpful for a few highly repeatable tasks, but they are not the foundation of good AI work. The better habit is explaining the assignment as you would to a skilled teammate.
State the outcome you need, the background that matters, what you have already tried, the constraints, and what a useful answer should include. If the task is complicated, tell the assistant what it should ask before it begins. Clear delegation beats a clever incantation because it gives the tool the information needed to do the job.
3. Move From Keywords to Guided Discovery
Search engines trained us to translate questions into short keyword strings. Conversational AI lets you begin with the actual problem. Explain what you are trying to find, why it matters, and what you already know. Then use follow-up questions to narrow the research.
This can make exploration faster, but it does not eliminate verification. Check sources, especially in areas outside your expertise or where the stakes are high. Use AI to reduce dead ends and expose options, then exercise judgment before treating an answer as reliable.
4. Move From Commands to Dialogue
The first prompt should not always be a production request. Start a conversation. Ask the assistant to identify unknowns, challenge your plan, propose decision criteria, or ask you clarifying questions. A back-and-forth conversation often produces a better brief before anyone begins drafting, building, or executing.
This is especially useful for ambiguous work. A campaign idea, new process, strategy decision, or difficult customer problem may need framing before it needs an answer. Dialogue helps reveal the real question.
5. Move From Replacement Anxiety to Amplification
AI can create reasonable work quickly, and that can make its capabilities feel threatening. But the strongest results still depend on people who can recognize quality, understand consequences, and draw on experience. The source calls that accumulated experience wisdom.
AI can amplify what you bring. It can help a beginner become more capable, but it can also help an experienced person move faster, test more alternatives, and communicate a hard-won insight more clearly. The difference is not only access to the tool. It is the judgment used to direct and evaluate it.
Start small. Bring AI into one real project, explain the context, invite it to ask questions, and verify what comes back. The habit of thinking with AI develops through use, reflection, and a willingness to remain responsible for the final decision.
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In this AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez dives into the five essential mindset shifts marketers need to adopt to fully leverage AI. He explains how success with AI isn't just about prompts, but about rethinking how we approach intelligence, collaboration, and productivity in an AI-assisted world.
My Favorite AI Tools
- Tella - https://danchez.com/tella
- High Level - https://danchez.com/highlevel
- Zencastr - https://danchez.com/podtools
- n8n - https://danchez.com/n8n
Timestamps
- 00:00 – Why it’s about how you think, not what you type
- 00:49 – Mindset Shift 1: Thinking alone → Thinking with a co-intelligence
- 02:52 – Mindset Shift 2: Copying prompts → Practicing prompting
- 05:13 – Mindset Shift 3: Google searching → Discovering with AI
- 06:57 – Mindset Shift 4: Directing AI → Dialoguing with AI
- 08:39 – Mindset Shift 5: Fear of replacement → Amplifying your expertise
Speaker: When it comes to AI, it's not so much about what you type. It's about how you think with AI. With every technological revolution, there's always outdated mindsets that we have to unlearn in order to truly learn and leverage the new thing.
Speaker: It happened when we moved from yellow pages over to Google. And it's happening now when we move from search and social media and the way we interact with the web now to this thing called artificial intelligence.
Speaker: And in this video, I want to show you five different mindsets that are actually holding you back from leveraging all the AI has to offer now and in the future. In the last video we talked about how to prime ChatGPT and getting it ready to go so that it can do everything it needs to do without having to read your mind.
Speaker: In this video I actually need to prime you so that you're ready to use ChatGPT. The first mindset shift we need to make is around thinking alone to thinking with a co-intelligence.
Speaker: This one's hard because it's a big shift that we've never had to encounter before. Most of the time we've had to think and strategize and plan with our own brains. But now there's a shift happening where we have AI as a co-pilot.
Speaker: I want you to think about it more as a colleague rather than a tool. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying AI is a person. I'm not saying AI will ever be a person. I i strongly believe that AI really is just a sophisticated tool that's really good at predicting what word or what image or what video to play next.
Speaker: But it's also fantastic at mimicking real intelligence. And that real intelligence or that mimicry can be put to use for you. No longer do you have to be alone in your thinking and your planning in your orchestrating of your projects or even different parts of your life. You now have this co-intelligence that you can lean on, not to become lazy in your own thinking, but to supplement it, challenge it, and press it into deeper parts that you've never been able to go to before.
Speaker: It will amplify everything that you have So you need to start thinking about AI as a colleague that you're working alongside, helping you through all your challenges, helping you through all your opportunities.
Speaker: And the practical takeaway is start thinking about AI as the on-call 24-7, 365 expert that you can tap into anytime and even bring along for you in the ride of whatever project you're working on. The second mindset shift is the one that we need to move from copying prompts to practicing prompting.
Speaker: Now, let me get this clear. We use prompts every time we talk to AI. Everything thing we send to AI is essentially a prompt. Yet, prompting and prompts has become a whole culture of prompt libraries. And what prompt did you use to get that?
Speaker: It's something I'm asked frequently as someone who speaks on AI all the time. What prompt did you use? And honestly, other than a few well-chosen, well-crafted prompts for some very specific things,
Speaker: I don't have a prompt library. I don't use prompts. I simply delegate to AI and have it return to me the thing that I asked for. And if you are confused about this, just think about how you delegate to your teammates.
Speaker: You don't think about what what delegation method did you use to get that off your plate and onto your co-workers plate or onto to your direct reports plate. That's silly. You just delegated effectively that particular task at that specific time, right?
Speaker: It's the same thing with AI. We don't need a prompt library. We just need to learn how to prompt or aka delegate better. And if you think about the first mindset shift, this is where it really becomes practical.
Speaker: If you think about it like a colleague, then you start to treat it like a colleague. Again, it's not a person, but treat it like one and you'll be able to get more out of it. So the practical takeaway for this one is to not only treat it like an expert, but explain problems to it like it's an expert.
Speaker: If you had an expert on the phone or via text, how would you describe the problem that you want fixed? What's the outcome that you want? What's the steps you already took to fix it that you found didn't work?
Speaker: like Give it the right context, just like you would giving an expert human. and watch it go to work for you. before we go on you father i just have to say this is video two of a five part course on how to master chat gp yes if you want the full course go to aidrinmarketer dot com slash course and you can get it entirely free it's even going to be customized just for you based on your job title what industry you're in and what you're trying to accomplish So go to aidrivenmarketer.com slash course to get the full lineup with a custom script just for you. In the third mindset shift, we need to go from searching for things on Google to discovering new possibilities with AI or ChatGPT specifically.
Speaker: Every research project used to start with keywords. We would go to Google and put in some keywords, not find what we were looking for, but refine our search, go and find something, maybe maybe find the thing we were looking for, and we were always hunting for a problem. It was like searching through a maze without a map, and we would just hit dead end after dead end, blue link after blue link, until we found our way through.
Speaker: But we don't need that anymore because using ChatGPT, especially ChatGPT with search attached to it, is a lot like navigating a maze with GPS. It just gives you turn by turn directions and gives you exactly what you need when you need it and has the ability to follow up with your follow up questions. It even prompts you by asking you if you want this next thing.
Speaker: And I find the more I use ChatTipati, the better it is at predicting what I'm gonna ask next after it gives me its initial findings. So we need to shift our mindset from doing a lot of initial search and research ourselves to essentially delegating the searching part and letting AI do what it does in finding the answer for us and bringing it back to us. It's not that we trust everything that it gives us either. We need to use discernment, especially around areas that we don't have a sense of expertise in.
Speaker: We need to look carefully at it and still evaluate it as AI improves its hallucination, these things that makes up, right? We need to be careful of that. But at the same time, there's a lot of standard things that we know how to do. We know how to evaluate how good and how well it's done with.
Speaker: So we can search less, discover more, and get things done faster. Practical takeaway for this one is to just replace all your searches with just ChatGPT. Even if it seems like Google's the absolute right option for it, just try it in ChatGPT. Throw all your searches and into ChatGPT or some other AI tool just to learn what it's capable of, what's possible, so that then after many, many tries, you can go back to Google for what Google's still good at and then AI for what AI is good at.
Speaker: And you will find, like many of us, that more and more of your searches will go to AI as you begin to build a sense of competence and how to use it, but also competence in AI's ability to find the thing that you're looking for. The fourth mindset shift that we need to do is going from directing AI to dialoguing with it.
Speaker: Because this isn't a one-way conversation. AI as a tool is actually quite conversational. And it gets better the more you actually have an ongoing conversation, a dialogue back and forth with AI.
Speaker: So yes, ask it questions, get advice, even crack a joke between you and ChatGPT. Have a dialogue with it and you'll find that your results get much better. It's not a tool just to be delegated to. Again, think of it like a colleague.
Speaker: You could have an ongoing conversation in order to make it much better. stronger The practical takeaway for this mindset is instead of just kicking off a project with ChatGPT, telling it what to do, start with the conversation first and ask it to ask you questions to get more clarity or to give you advice or to give you feedback or to maybe make some considerations at the very beginning of a project.
Speaker: Try it one time and you will see how powerful the results are. I promise you will not go back to the old way of doing it once you just try it one time. The fifth mindset shift that we need to make is probably the most important of all.
Speaker: We need to shift our fear of being replaced to an optimism around AI's ability to amplify our own expertise. Because AI is good at so many things. and And if you start working through all these different mindsets we need to change,
Speaker: you'll start to find that AI is extremely good at what it does. It is extremely powerful. And it might strike a chord of fear in your heart. I think it does for all of us. You're like, oh my gosh, what will it not be able to do soon?
Speaker: The reality is AI is nothing without its human counterparts who have real discernment, expertise, and taste based on the road of hard knocks, right? Based on reality, based on actually having us work through things the more painful way.
Speaker: That expertise was not easily earned. It's valuable. There's another word for it in the English language we have for expertise that has experience behind it.
Speaker: It's called wisdom. And AI can never have that. It can never have the level of wisdom that pain has taught us. And I think that's the most exciting shift of all.
Speaker: AI is a tool. Treat it like a colleague, but at the end of the day, it's a tool that can amplify your expertise, amplify what you know. It can take you from a one to a four, but it can take a seven to a 10. It can take a 10 to a 20. That's just what AI does.
Speaker: It takes what you have and makes it stronger. We're all all going to be stronger even in our weak area, but even more so, it's going to amplify our greatness. So those are the five mindset shifts you need to make in order to truly leverage AI for what it's capable of