This isn’t about learning to code. This isn’t even about becoming a “prompt engineer.” Becoming an AI Native means you stop treating AI like a novelty or a tool to be used occasionally and start thinking of it as an extension of your mind, your workflow, your ambition. It’s a shift from using AI to thinking with AI. You stop asking “what can AI do?” and start asking “what can I do now that I have AI by my side?”
We already rely on digital memory (Google), shared consciousness (Slack), and extended cognition (YouTube tutorials). AI just takes this further.
Becoming AI Native means understanding:
- You don’t have to hold all the information—you just need to know how to ask.
- You can turn first drafts, decisions, and insights into AI-collaborated artifacts in seconds.
- You’re never really working alone again—you’re pair-programming your life with a very fast, very smart assistant.
- It’s less about replacing your brain and more about rewiring your brain’s relationship to work.
In the AI era, your ability to ask great questions, guide responses, and refine outputs is how you begin to leverage AI effectively. Think of GenAI, LLMs, etc as incredibly smart workers – smarter than you – but ones that have a hard time communicating in a way you’re used to perhaps, with your team or co-workers. You can’t write a prompt and say “Build me something like Salesforce but for Pet Companies” and expect a good outcome.
Yes, AI, as we are referring to it here, is becoming more and more capable as time goes on, but the need to write a good prompt and get what you need AI to do for you is also evolving. Today, you don’t need to have a model with 10 agents and an orchestrator all working together in a super complex configuration, because MCP now allows a baseline AI agent to use tools much like an employee of a company can have a role but leverage tools to do the actual work – tools you yourself don’t need to build – and this is only going to increase in capability and potential. (Learn more about what MCP is here).
To become fluent then, and work towards being an AI native, you need to start with understanding how to maximize your use of AI:
- Write, then rewrite your prompts using AI to help. Start by asking your favorite AI tool to take a question you have and write a good prompt to then copy and paste back into the AI tool. Did you get a good answer? No? Let your AI session know that, and ask why it didn’t give you what you thought you wanted. Use AI to write what you know, leverage it to improve, and iterate until you get a handle of what makes a good prompt. Once you get that answer, build on your success to evolve the answer, and leverage AI to help you get better as you go. Don’t assume you need to know everything or anything, outside of what’s in your head, to start and grow your ability to write a good prompt, leveraging that very same AI session to do it.
- Treat prompt history like version control—save the good ones, build on them, share them. Look for communities of domain experts like you leveraging AI, what prompts are they writing? What are they using AI for? Having a community is key to getting cultural immersion with AI in your given field.
- Learn to layer context, constraints, and tone to turn raw AI into tailored outputs. What surprises new people about AI is just how capable it is to understand you as you go, and allows you to be as expressive and wordy as possible, with the ability to learn you and your approach, style, and tone as you go. You don’t like one part of the response? Tell the AI session that – give it an example of what you’d like to see, and make sure that’s incorporated going forward. A given AI session won’t remember that context in future conversations unless you want it to, though the residual memory capabilities different AI companies have enabled is growing by the day too, between sessions (as something you can opt into).
- AI fluency isn’t technical—it’s conversational precision. Much like Excel taught us to use functions like VLookup, LLMs are teaching us to compose questions and responses in a way unique to AI. AI has a language and a way of working, and the most powerful practitioners learn it and leverage it. Suppose you work at Amazon and want to be successful. In that case, you learn to become a technical writer no matter where you work – the same is true to leverage AI, you need to work on how to communicate more than you need to worry about being technical or understanding everything under the hood. A good driver isn’t necessarily a good mechanic with a car, right? They say in writing that the best authors make bad editors, so don’t worry about not being technical here – just conversational in a way that maximizes the output of your agents.
The AI Native doesn't jump on every shiny new AI app—they build a personal AI stack:
- A chat assistant for writing, brainstorming, and decision-making (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.)
- A visual assistant for designing, prototyping, and explaining (Midjourney, Runway, etc.)
- A workflow agent for automating your daily grind (Zapier+AI, AutoGPT, personal RAG setups)
AI will take many forms, as companies building tools release AI to operate in a specific way for a specific set of use cases. Don’t expect ChatGPT to do everything for you, as the public-facing “Chat” style AI tools have as many limitations as they have capabilities. Leveraging AI means using the API and tapping right into the backend, which is then leveraged to perform an ever-increasing array of tasks. If you’re not comfortable leveraging an API and using AI to build something yourself, just get your “toolbelt” together to know how to use AI where, based on what you need done.
It’s less about being everywhere and more about choosing high-leverage tools that extend what you already do well.
AI can do shallow work for you—drafts, summaries, cold outreach. Great. But don’t use that time just to answer more emails. Think of the things you can do as a pyramid of many layers, with the things at the bottom of the pyramid being the boring grunt work you need to get done and the top level of the pyramid is the purest expression of your ability, something you truly enjoy, and something you and only you can do best. Start using AI for what’s at the bottom, and work your way up. It’ll never hit the top, but it can go pretty far up the pyramid freeing you up for giving you more time for the work that is most meaningful and useful for you to be doing.
The AI Native reinvests their freed-up hours into:
- Learning deeply (AI can teach you anything—fast and point you to resources to extend your knowledge out further on topics relevant to you).
- Thinking strategically (zooming out, not just iterating faster, and getting “meta” in your thinking).
- Creating boldly (ideas that used to take teams now take one person with the right loop, leveraging AI to do the work of folks you may not have access to).
- Rethinking how you think of the world you live in, from your sector, the economy, business structures, etc., and using your newfound AI capabilities to challenge your own biases and blind spots. An AI session makes for a great debate partner that never loses interest in the conversation.
The future belongs to those who let AI handle the bottom 40 %+ of the work that clogs their day, so they can spend the rest of the time doing what only they can do and enjoy doing.
I love to write, but I struggle with writing everything from scratch, writing everything from memory, or writing things in the right way. How much of this was written by AI? How much was written by me? Hopefully you can’t tell ;) But I can tell you a lot got done much faster because of my use of AI, and hopefully, you’re benefiting from this work as a result.
AI Natives don’t settle for one-and-done outputs. They:
- Ask follow-ups from the AI-generated responses in the same session.
- Explore variations and modify their questions to look at different answers or approaches.
- Tune over time, to adjust the way you ask and interact with AI to work out any lingering bias or unfamiliarity with how best to leverage AI via prompts.
Everything becomes iterative—your content, your ideas, your decisions. You evolve by conversation, not by committee. And you develop a sense of creative agency that compounds, which is where AI becomes an extension of you, no different than any other digital tool you’ve leveraged over the years – just in a much more profound and powerful way.
Click on the Next Chapter Below To Keep Going
Introduction: A Company Strategy for AI: How companies develop a strategy to leverage AI, and change in a way that maximizes AI effectively
Chapter 1: A Company Strategy for AI: How companies develop a strategy to leverage AI, and change in a way that maximizes AI effectively
Chapter 2: Use AI (more) effectively as a Startup: How startups begin to leverage AI and avoid turning into a failed science project
Chapter 4: Vibe Coding your first AI project: How you (yes YOU) can build your first AI app, and get more comfortable with what AI can beyond ChatGPT
Chapter 5: Surfing the AI Tsunami: Where We Are, What We've Learned, and What Comes Next
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