Anthropic's AI fluency chief says the best AI users know when to do the work themselves

At Anthropic, Kristen Swanson's role is to help people get better at using AI.

"I have a job teaching people how to use AI, and I probably spend at least half of my time telling people when not to use AI," said Swanson, who leads AI fluency research and learning at the company.

The savviest AI users, she said, aren't necessarily those who rush to it for every task. What sets them apart is their judgment about what to delegate.

That's becoming an increasingly important workplace skill as AI finds its way into more of what people do. The challenge isn't only learning how to use the technology. It's knowing when it can save time, when it might create more work, and when a task is better left to a person.

In some cases, Swanson said, evaluating what AI produces takes more effort than doing the task yourself. It's what she calls a "discernment tax."

When people hand off the right things to AI, Swanson said, the time spent reviewing its output can be worthwhile. Yet for tasks people are already adept at doing, evaluating AI's work can eat into whatever time they hoped to save.

Properly judging what AI produces, Swanson said, "is the highest-order thinking that you can do. It's actually exhausting."

That's why asking AI for help with tedious data analysis might make sense, she said. Yet having it write a social media post about something you're knowledgeable about could leave you doing more work, "parsing through all of this stuff."

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The discernment tax isn't the only reason to keep some work away from AI. The technology's limitations can also make delegation risky.

"If you're asking AI about a really niche research paper or researcher, and it didn't have a lot of that information in its training, it might hallucinate," said Swanson.

Bosses are also trying to draw clearer boundaries around when employees should turn to AI. While many companies are pushing workers to embrace the technology, some CEOs have warned against letting it substitute for employees' own thinking.