You AI, Or AI You?
You've two paths: 1/ You are being AI’d Or 2/ You are AI-ing. Your Choice!
2025 was the year AI got real, and one of the most dangerous sentence in your career right now isn’t “Your job will be automated.” It’s something far quieter, something you probably said this week.
“Sure, I’ll have ChatGPT take a first pass at that.”
That sentence is the sound of you willingly training your own replacement. It’s the sound of you handing over the keys to the kingdom, but with the whimper of a thousand lazy prompts.
We’ve been so obsessed with the question of whether AI will take our jobs that we’ve missed the far more important one: Is AI making us better, or is it just making us faster at being mediocre?
The answer to this question defines your next decade. It’s a choice, and you’re making it with every query you type. Are you going to be the person who operates the machine, or the person whose thinking the machine can’t replicate?
Are you going to AI, or is AI going to you?
New Performance Review: AI Turing Test
Forget your quarterly goals. Forget your 360 reviews. Here’s the only performance review that matters now.
Take the last strategy doc you wrote. The last email to a client. The last piece of code you committed. Put it on a screen. Now, open a new window and spend ten minutes writing a good prompt to have an AI generate the same thing.
Place them side-by-side.
Now, be brutally honest with yourself: If you showed these two documents to your boss, could they reliably tell which one you wrote? Could your team? Could your customers?
If the answer is “no,” or even a hesitant “maybe,” you are already obsolete. You just haven’t been fired yet.
When your unique professional contribution becomes indistinguishable from a machine’s derivative output, your value is zero. You’re a commodity. A prompt-follower. A fleshy interface for the API. And commodities are always replaced by a cheaper, faster alternative.
2 Paths: A Choice Between Leverage and Redundancy
Every time you open an AI tool, you’re standing at a fork in the road.
Path #1: You are being AI’d.
This is the path of least resistance. The path of efficiency. Your goal is to get the task done.
Your prompts sound like this:
“Summarize this meeting transcript.”
“Write a marketing email for the new product launch.”
“Give me 5 ideas for a blog post about productivity.”
You’ve asked the AI to do your job for you. You’ve outsourced the thinking.
The result is a generic, soulless, C+ output that’s “good enough.” You’ve saved an hour. But what you’ve lost is an opportunity to think, to synthesize, to create a unique point of view. You’re not building a skill; you’re eroding one. You’re becoming the manager of a very capable intern, and your only real value is knowing the intern’s name.
Path #2: You AI-ing.
This is the path of agency. The path of amplification. Your goal isn’t to get the task done; it’s to arrive at a better, non-obvious answer.
Your prompts sound like this:
“Act as a panel of my five sharpest critics: a skeptical CFO, a cynical engineer, a demanding customer, a visionary futurist, and a pragmatic CEO. Here is my strategy document. Each of you, tear it apart from your unique perspective.”
“Generate 10 radically different business models for this product. Three must be illegal or impossible in today’s market. Three must be based on business models from the 18th century. The rest are up to you. I want to break my own thinking.”
“Simulate a board meeting where I present this plan. You are three board members who have just seen a competitor’s product that is twice as good and half the price. What are the three questions that make me sweat?”
You haven’t asked the AI to do your job. You’ve commanded it to build you a cognitive gym. You are using it to pressure-test your ideas, to simulate futures, to make your own thinking more resilient. You’re not outsourcing the work; you’re scaling your intellect.
Playbook: From Prompting to Architecting
This isn’t an abstract choice. It’s a ladder of skill, and you need to be consciously climbing it.
Level 1: AI Intern. You give it simple, task-based commands. “Write,” “summarize,” “list.” This is the danger zone. The more time you spend here, the faster your own skills atrophy.
Level 2: AI Analyst. You ask it to synthesize data, find patterns, and create first drafts. “Analyze this data and tell me the three most surprising correlations.” “Take these raw notes and structure them into a coherent proposal.” This is better, but it’s still passive.
Level 3: AI Sparring Partner. You use it to challenge you. You feed it your ideas and ask it to find the flaws. “Here’s my argument. What is the strongest possible counter-argument?” This is where real value creation begins. You are using the machine to sharpen your own mind.
Level 4: AI Simulator. You use it to model complex systems and explore possibilities. You architect worlds for it to inhabit. “Simulate a market with three competing products. Here are their specs and marketing strategies. Run a thousand rounds and tell me who wins and why.” This is the future of strategy. You’re not just thinking about the future; you’re building a laboratory to test it.
IC’s Playbook: How to Not Get AI’d
As an individual contributor, the pressure is to be faster. Your boss might even be the one asking you to “just use AI.” Your job is to resist the siren song of mediocrity and actively demonstrate that your value isn’t your output but it’s your thinking.
1. Show Your Work.
Never present an AI-generated artifact as a finished product. Present it as a starting point.
Don’t say: “Here’s the new marketing copy.”
Do say: “The AI generated five initial concepts. I’ve discarded the first four because they were generic. The fifth one had an interesting kernel of an idea, …”
You’re not showing them what you made; you’re showing them how you thought.
2. Become a “Prompt Architect.”
The new senior IC is the one who can build the best cognitive gym. Share your powerful, thought-provoking prompts with the team.
Don’t just share the answer. Share the question that got you there. When you share a great prompt, you’re signaling that you’re not just a task-doer; you’re the one who knows how to ask the right questions.
3. Use AI to Go Upstream.
When you’re asked to do a task, use AI to challenge the premise of the task itself.
The ask: “We need to write a requirement document about our new feature.”
Your process: Go to your AI sparring partner. “Our goal is to increase user adoption of this feature. What are nine other, more creative tactics we could use to achieve this goal? Think about channels we’ve never used before.”
You’ve just elevated your work from execution to strategy.
A Question for Leaders: Are You Building a Team or a Prompt Farm?
You think your job is to encourage your team to use AI. You’re wrong.
Your job is to stop them from using it badly. Your job is to elevate their taste and their critical thinking so they can distinguish between derivative garbage and genuine insight.
Stop asking your team, “What did you produce?” The artifact is irrelevant if it was generated in 30 seconds.
Start asking them:
“What were the five worst ideas the AI gave you before you got to this one?”
“What was the most challenging question you asked the AI?”
“Show me the prompt that led to a surprising insight.”
You need to reward the quality of the thinking, not the speed of the output. If you don’t, you’re not building a team of strategic thinkers. You’re managing a prompt farm, and your company’s intellectual property is now just a folder of clever `.txt` files.
3 Traps AI Will Set For Your Career
This isn’t just about good habits. It’s about avoiding career-ending traps. AI is a powerful tool, but it’s also a trickster. It sets traps that look like shortcuts.
1. Taste Trap.
AI has no taste. It is a brilliant synthesizer of the average. It can tell you what is popular, but it cannot tell you what is good exactly for your work. It can write a song that sounds like The Beatles, but it could never have been The Beatles. If you rely on it for creative, strategic, or branding decisions, you are outsourcing your taste.
2. Conviction Trap.
AI is a confidence machine. It presents its answers with absolute authority, even when they are completely, catastrophically wrong. It doesn’t say “I’m not sure.” It hallucinates with perfect grammar. If you stop fact-checking it, if you stop pressure-testing its assumptions, you will eventually present a beautiful, confident, and utterly false piece of work that will destroy your credibility.
3. Stagnation Trap.
The most seductive trap of all is using AI to make your current job easier. You become incredibly efficient at doing the things you already do. But you stop learning. You stop stretching. You’re so busy optimizing your current workflow that you don’t see that the workflow itself is about to become obsolete.
Your Choice At The End
The battle for your career won’t be fought against a machine. It will be fought inside your own head between being efficient or knowing your only real value lies in being original.
You can be the person who gets answers from the machine, or you can be the person the machine can’t answer without.
One is a career. The other is a temporary job.
So, who is it going to be? You AI, or AI you?
If these frameworks resonated with you, this is just the beginning. In 2026, Product Voyagers is going deep on how the best minds are using specific tools and detailed playbooks on mastering tools like Cursor Agents, NotebookLM, and more to become an AI-leveraged leader from real scenarios.