Top 5 Essential Skills for Using AI Responsibly

It’s been a year since the launch of ChatGPT. This AI tool and an array of others are expected to simplify certain aspects of our work lives and free up our time for innovation: as long as we know how to leverage AI correctly, responsibly, and ethically. Scrum teams and other agile professionals are especially well-prepared to adopt new AI technologies because of their experience with adapting and pivoting in response to new variables, conditions, and requirements.

According to OpenAI, 80% of Fortune 500 companies have adopted ChatGPT. Your employer may be embracing these technologies, avoiding them, or may fall somewhere in the middle. Regardless, tools like ChatGPT will only continue to evolve, and becoming an adept AI user is a great way to boost your resume and future-proof your work skills.

To stay ahead of the curve, let’s focus on five important skills you’ll need to get the most out of artificial intelligence:

• Fact-checking
• Communication 
• Project management
• Problem-solving
• Adaptability

#1. Apply fact-checking

AI chatbots provide a seemingly infinite amount of information at your fingertips; however, the quality and accuracy of this information are not a given. Many LLMs have been trained on old data, and that information hasn't been updated in the years following. LLMs are also likely to produce biased and discriminatory outputs, incorrect information, and distortions of truth. As such, skilled AI users must always question the validity of the information and have the fact-checking skills needed to validate it. 

Especially if you plan to use a large language model like ChatGPT to help you make decisions, create content, plan your scrum team's retrospective, or write an email, these skills will help you verify that the information the tool produces is accurate:

• Check the information against another source
• Experiment with requesting citations from the chatbot (and verify the citation is a legitimate source)
• Research and inform yourself about where the tool you are using is getting the learning dataset from
• Evaluate outputs for underlying bias and prejudice
• Trust your skepticism if something doesn't seem right

Ethical AI use will involve critically evaluating the outputs so that people can rely on your work.

#2. Improve your communication skills

Effective communication skills are essential for explaining complex AI concepts to non-technical stakeholders and collaborating with multidisciplinary teams. Your ability to communicate clearly will also be important when you partner with AI tools to create emails, presentations, reports, and other messages; don't assume these tools can do a better job of conveying your message than you can.

A few ways to improve your communication skills are:

• Practice clear and concise writing. While we may have been taught in college to write with enormous detail and that more is better, in today’s business world the opposite is true. You need to quickly get to the point and write engaging, clear messages. Honing this skill will help you take the content outputs from AI as a starting point to create your own clear, engaging message.

• Being a great storyteller is an amazing skill! If this isn’t your forte, try taking a storytelling course or workshop from an online provider like Udemy, or take a speaking or drama course in your local community.

• Work on your public speaking skills. Ask to lead a meeting or present to a room of stakeholders, even if it’s outside of your comfort zone. A great course to take to improve this skill is Agile Coaching Skills - Certified Facilitator (ACS-CF). In fact, you can use LLMs and AI to give you a training schedule for any skill, day by day. For example, ask ChatGPT to provide you with a 5-day training schedule to improve your public speaking skills. 

Developing your communication abilities will bolster your use of AI to create messages, emails, content, presentations, reports, and more. You'll be better equipped to utilize AI as a supportive tool for ideation and information instead of relying on AI for the creation of the final content.

#3. Sharpen project management prowess

While AI can do some of the technical lift involved with a project (like writing code, writing a paragraph, creating an image, or generating an agenda), your projects still require oversight and QA of any final products in addition to managing timelines, budgets, technology, and people. Project management skills remain highly relevant. Here are a few ways to learn how to manage complex projects:

• If there’s a project management office at your workplace, ask if you can shadow someone in managing a program or project. This is a great way to get hands-on experience.

• Become a Certified ScrumMaster. While the role of scrum master is different from a project manager, you still learn the soft skills of working with teams and people and empowering greatness—something that AI can’t replace.

• Look for ways to manage projects in your local community. You could volunteer to coordinate a charity event, a neighborhood gathering, or a school event. Even outside of a business context, these are great ways to improve how you coordinate people, budgets, and timelines.

Want to find out how to leverage artificial intelligence on your agile team? Check out AI for Scrum Masters and AI for Product Owners, two microcredential courses that will prepare you to streamline and supercharge everything you do.

#4. Know how to solve problems

You’ll have an infinite amount of information at your fingertips with generative AI tools, but knowing what to do with it requires problem-solving. When using AI tools at work, you’ll need to be able to use information safely and responsibly. Strong problem-solving skills are important to master when working with this technology as you take your own research, personal experiences, and opinions into account and integrate that information with non-human information. 

Here are a few ideas for building this ability:

• Try taking on projects at your company that require you to problem-solve. This real-world experience will help you foster this skill, teaching you to be self-reliant and to look for creative solutions.

• You can also take an educational approach, reading blogs and other content on how other people have solved complex problems. Check out this Collaboration at Scale webinar to learn about problem types and strategies.

• As we've always done with agile, take an iterative approach to problem-solving. See what's working well and continue down that path. When you find an approach that isn't working for problem-solving, quickly pivot.

Remember that problem-solving is a skill that improves with practice and experience. Consistent effort, a willingness to learn from mistakes, and a curiosity-driven approach will contribute to developing effective problem-solving skills.

#5. Practice adaptability

People who are adaptable often view the emergence of new technologies as an opportunity to learn, grow, and evolve. If you consider yourself an agile professional, then you are poised to embrace AI with an adaptable mindset. An adaptable approach to artificial intelligence will be integral to your ability to pivot as artificial intelligence inevitably evolves. You'll be ahead of the game as someone who embraces such change but who has also developed the skill set to use these new tools responsibly.

Learn how to leverage AI as an agile copilot

By embracing change and mastering the soft skills that will be an important part of integrating emerging technology, you’ll be prepared for the evolving world of work. Dig deeper into fact-checking, effective communication, and project management, all of which are top skills needed by humans to complement AI. Utilizing AI requires ethical responsibility and the ability to take data that you receive and validate it with credible sources, as well as add your own experiences and opinions to incorporate the humanity still needed.

AI & Agility: A Comprehensive Introduction is a free e-learning course from Scrum Alliance. Explore the intersection of artificial intelligence and agility to better understand how an agile mindset will support your everyday use of AI technologies.