The compass
How you use AI matters
AI can be safe, effective, ethical, and still sound like you.
The what axis
Delegation and Diligence, top to bottom. The promises you make to yourself and to everyone else about using AI at all.
The how axis
Description and Discernment, side to side. How you hand work off, and how you judge what comes back.
About the framework
The four skills are drawn from the AI Fluency Framework developed by Prof. Rick Dakan (Ringling College of Art and Design) and Prof. Joseph Feller (University College Cork), released under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. I completed Anthropic Education's AI Fluency for Small Businesses course, where this framework is taught. The compass diagram, the what/how axes, and the framing of each skill as something of yours are mine.
Delegation: Your Craft
What do you keep?
You've made this call about every assistant, every contractor, every post you scheduled to go out while you slept. At some point you stopped being present for everything that happens in your business. Same muscle. The work that runs on your judgment stays close. Everything else is a candidate, and you choose the line.
Description: Your Methods
What do you ask?
Be brutally specific, especially about the picky things. Constraints first. Ask for three options instead of one. When something's wrong, say what, precisely. You already know how to brief a person. This is that, written down once instead of explained every time.
Discernment: Your Standards
What do you accept?
You know what good looks like in your business. You've known for years. That expertise transfers to nobody, which is exactly why you're still the one reading the output. The first draft is a starting point, not an answer.
Diligence: Your Name
What do you own?
Yours. Be careful with "digital employee." Twelve hundred managers were shown identical work, and the ones told an AI employee made it caught eighteen percent fewer errors. One word made people read less carefully and own it less. Unreviewed output is dangerous lorem ipsum: placeholder text wearing a suit. It reads as finished, it's mistakable for true, and nobody has checked it. Read it before it ships.
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Learn how AI can help your business, and where it can't
Book a free 20-minute call with someone who's done it before. Bring one real job, and we'll find where it saves you the most time, and where to be careful.