Uncover what you don't know you don't know

There are a couple of reasons I love working with A.I.

The first is how it surfaces blind spots and biases I'd stopped noticing — and opens up an infinite library of templates I never would have reached for on my own. The second is stranger: it works like an oracle. You can ask it what you don't know to even ask about a subject, and it can tell you both what the question should be and the answer.

That first part — the blind spots — is a weird kind of mirror to hold up. Most tools just do what you tell them. Of course AI does what we tell it, but it also reflects back the shape of our thinking, including gaps. There are always assumptions we don't know we're making.

A lot of the time, the real problem isn't what or how we're thinking about something. It's that we're trying to pour our idea into the wrong container. We send a long message when someone needed a clean one-pager. We hand off a deliverable with no context because we've never worked somewhere that required documentation. Or we write a narrative when someone just needed a checklist. AI is remarkably good at handing us the right shape before we start wrestling the words.

The mirror thing is a different manifestation of this same idea. There's a perception gap most of us carry around — the space between what we think we're good at, what we want to be good at, and what other people actually experience us as good at. Inside our own heads those things blur together. We normalize our strengths. We discount what comes easy. AI can help separate those preconceptions — not as a final authority, but as something that allows us to look at ourselves with an outside point of view and recognize what keeps showing up.

That's SO useful. And a little uncomfortable, which is usually a good thing in my experience.

But the best version of using AI for discovery is when you ask it what questions you should even be asking. It sounds circular, but it's not. It's the fastest way to map unknown territory — the adjacent possible, all the nearby ideas we wouldn't naturally stumble into on our own. We don't know what we don't know. But the internet might, and with AI's help, we can bring those ideas to light.