AI Can Give You the Answer. Can You Tell If It’s Wrong?

I've been seeing an interesting shift in how people talk about AI skills.

A new IBM Institute for Business Value study found that 71% of CHROs surveyed consider the ability to supervise, validate, and override AI outputs an essential workforce skill, while only 29% of employees ranked judgment as important. The study surveyed 1,500 CHROs and 8,800 employees globally.

That gap is interesting because it changes the way I think about learning AI.

A lot of people are currently focused on learning which tool to use, how to write better prompts, or how to automate a task. Those skills are useful, but there's another layer that becomes increasingly important when AI is doing more of the actual work: knowing whether the output is correct in the first place.

If AI writes something for you, can you spot the mistake? If it analyzes data, can you tell when the conclusion doesn't make sense? If it gives you a recommendation, can you question the assumptions behind it?

For me, that's becoming an important part of working with AI. The goal isn't just to get better outputs from the tools. It's to become better at judging the outputs you receive.

AI can make the first draft faster. Human judgment is still what decides whether that draft is actually worth using.

Source: IBM Institute for Business Value — New IBM CHRO Study