I ran a survey (mostly on LinkedIn) over the past few weeks to get a feel for where people go to learn about AI tools, and also what they think are going to be the important skill areas to be able to get on top of.

The skill areas I asked about were:

• Understanding and applying AI tools
• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Creativity and innovation (the human stuff)
• Ethical decision-making with AI tools
• Managing the crossover between AI and people, and
• Prompt engineering

This wasn’t a big enough survey for statistical significance, but I was reassured that the top response response was ethical decision making, followed by understanding and applying AI tools. The rest were a fair way back (with prompt engineering last). This is telling me that people get the importance of ethics, and human factors, when using AI.

This is probably more a sign of worry than mastery at the moment, but the fact it’s a top-of-mind thing, means it’s a conversation that’s being had as part of AI tool implementation projects. I say keep taking about it, keep asking awkward questions, and let me know what you’d like me to explore more on here.

I would recommend following Riley Coleman on LinkedIn, or check out their AI Flywheel website. Riley’s a friend from a way back, so someone I trust to walk their talk, and they’re and very focused on ethical use of these tools.

Where and how to learn

It’s a jungle out there. Survey respondents were all talking about the lack of information, not knowing where to start, how so many of the courses were generic and focused on hype, rather than useful skills.

As a result, most people are relying on self-directed learning, through trial and error, to get a handle on these tools. And related to that, sharing information between friends and connections was another preferred method (which is potentially why blogs and free online resources are another a popular option – it’s people sharing their experiences of real use cases).

I’ve got a resources page on this site to hopefully help with this, but I’m not about to put something up on there that I haven’t tried and don’t think is helpful, so it’s likely to be a slow build. Happy to add links you recommend – I can have a section ‘recommended by other squishy humans’!

Please pop your thoughts and suggestions into the contact form on here, or email me at hello@aiforsquishyhumans.com I’d love to hear from you.