When AI has the answers…
Last week, I asked a question in class and gave the students permission to “look” for answers online, if they wanted to.
When I asked them to read out what they had written, I was impressed.
Polished. Well argued. Nicely structured.
Wait, perhaps a little TOO nicely structured!
It sounded remarkably like what AI would have said if I’d asked it the same question – but I didn’t say that aloud.
Instead, I picked a few students at random and asked: “Okay. But what do YOU think?”
Pause. Then a few familiar words were rearranged.
Another pause. Then, silence.
That silence really bothered me.
Not because the students had used AI – I actively encourage them to. What bothered me was something else…
Had the tool helped them think – or helped them avoid thinking?
Today is 5th September, Teachers’ Day in India, and I find myself asking an uncomfortable(?) question:
What exactly should we be teaching students when AI can give them answers to almost anything?
- Need a definition? Ask AI.
- Need a summary? Ask AI.
- Need ten ideas for a presentation? Ask AI.
- Need a 2,000-word assignment by tomorrow morning? Well… we know what happens next!
This isn’t entirely new
- When calculators became commonplace, we didn’t stop teaching mathematics.
- When Excel arrived, we didn’t stop teaching finance.
- PowerPoint didn’t eliminate the need to communicate.
- Canva didn’t make everyone a designer.
These tools changed what humans needed to be good at.
I think AI is doing the same thing.
Except there’s an important difference: Excel helps you calculate. Canva helps you design. PowerPoint helps you present.
And AI? AI helps you think.
And that’s precisely why knowing HOW to use it matters so much.
Don’t compete with AI at producing answers
I routinely tell my students there are three skills worth becoming exceptionally good at:
- Critical Thinking
- Decision Making
- Communication
Not because they’ll look impressive on a CV.
Because almost everything important they do in life will depend on them.
- Which internship should I take?
- Should I accept this job?
- Is this person someone I want to spend my life with?
- Should I buy the ₹40,000 phone or the ₹80,000 one?
The stakes change – the underlying abilities don’t.
And, in case you’re wondering… no, AI is NOT just the fourth on that skill list!
It’s a tool that can help us get better at all three – if we use it the right way.
1. Critical Thinking
The question is no longer merely: “Can I find the answer?”
Increasingly, it is: “Is this answer any GOOD?”
- What assumptions does it make?
- What evidence supports it?
- What’s been left out?
Here’s what worries me a little…
Remember those students from the start of this piece?
I went up to one of them, closed her laptop and asked her to explain her answer back to me, in her own words, using a different example.
She struggled. Properly struggled. Then, about halfway through, she got there. Not AI’s answer anymore. Hers.
There’s a name for this in learning science too. Psychologist Michelene Chi calls it the self-explanation effect.
People understand something far better once they have to explain it back in their own words, especially when they are forced to apply it somewhere new.
There’s a name for something related to what we’re seeing here in behavioural science: Cognitive offloading.
It means using an external tool, a calculator, notebook, search engine, now AI, to reduce the mental effort a task would otherwise demand.
Psychologists Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert, who reviewed the concept in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2016, point out that offloading isn’t automatically bad.
We do it constantly. And usefully. But if you routinely offload a particular kind of thinking, you may get less practice doing it yourself.
Convenient when it’s mental arithmetic. Less convenient when it’s the critical thinking, you’re supposed to be developing.
So don’t merely ask AI to answer your question… ask it to challenge your thinking.
Give it your argument and ask it to find weaknesses. Ask for the strongest case against your position.
Used this way, AI isn’t replacing critical thinking – it is providing a sparring partner for it.
2. Decision Making
AI can give you information. It can compare alternatives. It can build a decision matrix and surface trade-offs you hadn’t considered.
But it cannot decide what matters to you.
Imagine choosing between two jobs:
One pays more; the other offers better learning.
One is prestigious; the other gives you work you actually enjoy.
AI can help organise those variables.
But how much is each one worth to you? That’s judgement.
And judgement cannot be outsourced to a machine.
AI can even compare two phones down to processor speed, camera aperture and battery capacity.
It still can’t tell you whether ₹1.4 lakh for a phone is a brilliant investment or evidence that you need adult supervision!
3. Communication
This one may matter most of all.
AI can write an email – but should it be warm or firm?
AI can improve your grammar – but can you explain a complicated idea simply?
- Can you disagree without becoming disagreeable?
- Can you persuade without manipulating?
- Can you tell someone something they don’t want to hear – and still keep the conversation going?
Those remain deeply human skills.
And AI can help us practise them too.
Ask it to play…
- The difficult customer.
- The sceptical boss.
- The interviewer who isn’t impressed by your first answer.
Then practise.
That student, by the way, still remembers her own explanation, days later.
Though, I am not so sure she remembers ChatGPT’s original answer at all – which is a good thing!
So, what should we teach?
Perhaps we need to reconsider what it means to be “good at AI.”
It is not about knowing or memorising clever prompts.
It certainly isn’t about discovering fifteen AI tools before breakfast.
Over time, tools will continue to change – but not the deeper skills.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 asked employers what they’ll need most from their workforce through to 2030.
Analytical thinking topped the list, ahead of AI and big data skills themselves, with employers expecting roughly two in five core skills to change altogether.
That’s a fairly direct answer to my original question.
Don’t compete with AI at producing answers.
Get very good at knowing what to ask, what to question, what to keep, what to reject – and what to do with the answer.
Use AI to help you:
- Think better
- Choose better
- Communicate better
Not to avoid doing any of them.
Because perhaps our job as teachers was never really to give students answers – it was to help them become people who know what to do with them.
To those students, and to every teacher reading this: Happy Teachers’ Day.
Well, now you know it too!
Over to you… which of the three: critical thinking, decision making or communication, do you think AI is making harder to practise?
