For a New Year's resolution – be good at AI!

In 2 days, many people would be celebrating the start of the New Year 2026. Of those people, many would also be returning to the same exercise of setting resolutions, be it for health, wealth, family, spiritual, career, etc. Personally, I am not a fan of setting an annual resolution but rather following a continuous development and change as situations arise. Depending on and setting a plan just at the end of the year is most of the time bound to fail. I did write an article a year ago about the same. Nevertheless, I would like to dedicate this week's article on New Year resolutions for the many that follow the ritual or exercise per se. Yet with specific focus on being good at Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a goal for the year.

Go to the gym, register for an annual subscription and start exercising daily. Sound familiar? What about being productive, learning something new and attaining a new high-paying job? These are some of the common wishes virtually everyone makes at the end of the year (as part of New Year resolutions), yet many of these promises fade quickly, not because of their ambition but because the world around us changes faster than our habits. For this year, why not do something different that would certainly be very rewarding — be good at AI?

I am not asking you to master complex algorithms or become an AI engineer, but to understand AI well enough to use it intelligently, question it critically and apply it responsibly. AI is no longer a distant concept; it is already woven into daily work, decision-making, communication and creativity. Treating it as optional is increasingly unrealistic. In fact, almost everyone, every solution (product or service) and every organisation is trying to find ways to integrate AI. You need to know about it, learn how it works and find ways to use it to your advantage and of course, interact with the world ultimately.

Please don’t mistake being good at AI for becoming technical with it. NO! Just know what it is, what it can do and how it can help you. To be precise, learn about the various AI tools available and how you can interact with them to produce results you wish for (and look for). Being good at AI starts with understanding what AI can do and where it fails. Next is interacting with the designated AI tool by asking clear and structured questions, evaluating the outputs critically instead of accepting them blindly and finally applying human judgement, context and ethics before acting. You need to know how to work with AI but not surrender your thinking to it (as that is a disaster in the making, as I had shared in my previous articles).

Being good at AI also means knowing when not to trust it. Results generated by AI tools can sound very confident and still be wrong. It can reflect bias. It can miss cultural or contextual differences. It can generate information that appears credible but is inaccurate. I know this for a fact. Hence, do not trust it blindly; validate it. Critical thinking has not become less important in the age of AI. It has become essential, trust me.

To conclude my article for this week, I would like to emphasise that I do not believe AI will replace human intelligence. But I am convinced that those who know how to work with AI will replace those who do not. For that, I recommend adding AI as part of your New Year's resolutions so that you become irreplaceable (and relevant as you interact with the world that is injecting AI in almost every way). Instead of promising yourself to do more this year, choose to think better by being good, learning and wisely using AI. Until we catch up again next week, stay wise.