Let me tell you about the moment I realized something was broken in how we talk about AI.

I was having coffee with a friend—a successful entrepreneur, sharp as they come, runs a seven-figure business. We got to talking about AI, and she got this look on her face. Part embarrassment, part resignation.

“I know I should be using it,” she said. “Everyone’s talking about it. But every time I try, I just… don’t know what to type. I feel stupid.”

She doesn’t feel stupid running her business. She doesn’t feel stupid negotiating deals or managing her team. But a blank prompt box made her question herself.

That’s a teaching problem, not a learning problem.

The Tech Industry Failed You

Most AI education is built by tech people for tech people. It assumes you care about the underlying technology. It throws around terms like “large language models” and “neural networks” and “fine-tuning” as if understanding the engineering will help you write better emails.

It won’t. You don’t need to understand how the engine works to drive the car.

What you need is someone who can show you how AI fits into your actual work. Not abstract use cases. Your work. Your tasks. Your boulders.

The Prompt Box Problem

Here’s the thing about that blank prompt box: it’s intimidating because it offers infinite possibilities. And infinite possibilities are paralyzing.

When you sit down at a computer, you have menus and buttons and clear paths. When you sit in front of ChatGPT, you have… a cursor. What do you type? Where do you start? What if you “do it wrong”?

But here’s the secret: there’s no wrong. AI is incredibly forgiving. You can ask it the same thing twelve different ways and get useful answers from all of them. You can ask follow-up questions. You can tell it when it misunderstood you.

The barrier isn’t the technology. It’s the fear of looking stupid to a computer. And that fear goes away the moment you have someone show you how easy it actually is.

What Good Teaching Looks Like

I’ve been teaching AI workshops for a while now, and I’ve learned what works:

Start with their work, not with AI. What tasks are eating up their time? What writing do they dread? What decisions do they struggle with? We start there, then show how AI helps.

Use plain language. No jargon. No technical terms unless absolutely necessary. If you can’t explain it to a smart person who happens to not work in tech, you don’t understand it well enough.

Hands-on from minute one. Nobody learns to swim by reading about swimming. Within the first ten minutes, they’re typing prompts and seeing results. The fear dissolves immediately.

Celebrate the imperfect. AI doesn’t give perfect answers. Neither do humans. The magic is in the iteration—asking again, refining, building on what you get.

You’re Not Behind

If you’ve been avoiding AI because it feels too complicated, too technical, too “not for you”—you’re not behind. You just haven’t had the right introduction.

AI is a tool. Like any tool, it takes a few minutes to understand and a lifetime to master. But you can be useful with it in your very first session. You can save time today.

The technology isn’t the barrier. The teaching has been. And that’s fixable.