In an article recently published in Fortune, NLI’s Chris Weller and Dr. David Rock explore a striking trend in the modern workplace: while generative AI is everywhere, only a tiny fraction of employees are actually using it to enhance their thinking.
After three years of widespread adoption, the data is clear. Most workers either resist the technology or use it passively—essentially letting the AI do the "heavy lifting" while their own cognitive gears grind to a halt. However, a small group of "fluent users" has emerged. These individuals don't necessarily have higher IQs or better technical coding skills; instead, they share a single cognitive habit that makes their AI usage look almost magical.
They are practicing metacognition.
Putting the Human Back in the Driver’s Seat
Metacognition is the distinctly human ability to think about our own thinking. It involves reflecting on our stream of thoughts, mulling over assumptions, and incorporating new ideas to refine and evolve our mental models.
When most people use AI, they hand over the steering wheel, asking the chatbot for a finished product or a direct answer to a complex problem. Fluent users do the opposite. They cast AI in a supportive, rather than guiding, role. They use the tool to poke holes in their logic and expand their perspective, ensuring they remain the intellectual authority in the conversation.
3 Metacognitive Actions of AI Fluent Users
The Fortune article highlights three specific behaviors grounded in neuroscience that allow these users to stay sharper than the machines they work with:
- Humility: Fluent users approach AI with a growth mindset. By using hedge phrases like "I’m fairly confident, but I could be missing something," they keep their egos out of self-protection mode. This humility prevents the brain from shutting down, allowing new and challenging information to be processed.
- Flexibility: Instead of looking for a single "right" answer, fluent users use AI to explore multiple valid points of view. From a neuroscience perspective, cognitive flexibility activates a network of brain regions involved in cognitive control, including the prefrontal cortex, making the user more adaptive and open-minded.
- Vigilance:. Fluent users take an active role in driving their search for new perspectives, prioritizing getting it right over feeling right. They use AI to help them identify their own blind spots while remaining vigilant about the biases baked into the AI’s own training data.
The Road to Fluency
The most encouraging takeaway from the article is that metacognition isn't an innate talent—it is a trainable skill. In an era where many fear that AI will make us dumber or more dependent, these fluent users are proving the opposite: that the right cognitive habits can make us more insightful than ever.
When you stop asking AI for the answer and start asking it to help you think, you don’t just get a better output—you walk away from the interaction with a sharper mind.
To dive deeper into the research and see specific prompting strategies, you can read the full article in Fortune: The one skill that separates people who get smarter with AI from everyone else.
