I have one rule for AI on my team, and it’s done more for us than any tool: you can’t publish what you don’t understand.
It sounds restrictive. It’s actually what makes AI safe to hand people. The danger with a fast, fluent tool isn’t that it makes mistakes — it’s that it lets someone produce a confident, polished, wrong answer they couldn’t defend if you asked one question about it. Speed without understanding isn’t productivity. It’s liability in a nice font.
The rule is simple: use AI to build it, draft it, analyze it — whatever. But before it goes out with your name on it, before it becomes a decision or a number someone acts on, you have to be able to explain it. Where the data came from. Why the conclusion holds. What you’d say if someone pushed back. If you can’t, it’s not ready — no matter how good it looks.
Here’s why it matters more than it sounds. That one rule is the fork between AI making someone smarter and AI making them dependent. Force comprehension and every use is a rep — the person levels up, learns the underlying logic, gets better whether the tool is there or not. Skip it and you get the opposite: someone who generates output they can’t reason about, more capable on paper and less capable in the room, and a real risk the first time the AI is confidently wrong and nobody catches it.
I’ve watched it cut both ways. A supervisor with no fancy background who uses AI and insists on understanding it now builds analyses I’d be proud to present — because every rep taught him something. I’ve also seen sharp people outsource their thinking to the tool and quietly get worse. Same technology. The difference was the rule.
It also protects the thing culture is built on: trust in the numbers. If your team is publishing AI output nobody understands, you don’t have a knowledge base — you have a pile of confident guesses. The moment one blows up, trust in all of it goes with it.
So what? Unchecked, AI doesn’t automatically make your people smarter. It makes them faster — at being right or wrong. Comprehension is the setting that decides which.
Now what? Make it a norm, not a policy: nothing goes out with a person’s name on it unless they can explain it without the AI in the room. It’ll feel slower for a month. Then you’ll have a team that’s genuinely better — and output you can actually trust.
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