No.

… okay, you probably want a little more than that.

So why am I, on a website that encourages you to use AI and even tries to sell AI services, telling you that you shouldn’t trust AI?

I come from a family of carpenters. When I bought my first house, I didn’t call my family because they had hammers and saws I could trust; I called them because I trusted them to properly use hammers and saws. AI is a tool, and if you want work to be done well, you need to be able to trust the people using your tools.

There’s a lot of fear around AI, and rightfully so. It’s one of the most significant technological advances in our history. Like every technology, there’s a temptation to use it to be lazy, greedy, and destructive. Much like the internet, AI has incredible power to inform – and an equal or greater power to misinform. When advanced technology is used by people who are poorly trained, greedy, or just plain incompetent, it becomes incredibly dangerous.

The Carpenter Analogy Expanded

If you hand an untrained person a saw, they might cut a straight line. They might also spend that night in the hospital. The problem isn’t the saw; it’s that they weren’t prepared to use it. AI is the same way.

AI can analyze data, generate text, and assist in decision-making, but it has no inherent sense of ethics, correctness, or good judgment. That responsibility still belongs to the humans using it. A skilled carpenter knows which tool to use and how to use it safely. A skilled AI user knows how to ask the right questions, verify results, and recognize AI’s limitations.

The Real Risks of AI

AI isn’t just a neutral tool; it’s an amplifier. And just like a megaphone makes a loud voice louder (even when it’s wrong), AI can spread errors, biases, and outright fabrications faster than ever before. Here are some of the biggest risks AI poses:

1. Misinformation

AI is a confident liar. It can generate fake citations, misinterpret data, and present nonsense as absolute truth. This makes it both incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous, especially if you assume everything it generates is accurate.

2. Bias & Ethical Issues

AI models are trained on existing data, which means they inherit human biases. That can result in skewed hiring practices, discriminatory decisions, and flawed recommendations. AI doesn’t think critically about fairness—it just follows patterns. If the data it learned from has problems, so will its outputs.

3. Security & Privacy Risks

AI can be exploited to generate phishing scams, deepfakes, and social engineering attacks. Businesses using AI need strong security policies in place to ensure they’re not opening themselves up to data breaches or ethical landmines.

4. Over-Reliance & Job Displacement

AI is a tool, not a replacement for human decision-making. Companies that over-rely on AI without human oversight risk making disastrous mistakes. Worse, if organizations start replacing critical thinking with automated responses, they’ll erode the very expertise that makes their business valuable.

AI Isn’t Magic – It’s Math

There’s a tendency to think of AI as a form of digital wizardry. It’s not. AI doesn’t “think”; it calculates. It doesn’t “know”; it predicts. Every AI response is just a probability-based guess, built on patterns from its training data. It has no understanding of the world around it, it simply knows that its probability models have determined to a high degree that your input is best matched by its output. That means it can be incredibly useful, but it can also be spectacularly wrong in ways that are hard to detect if you’re not actively looking.

Compare it to previous technological revolutions:

• The internet gave us instant access to information, but also a flood of misinformation.

• Automation increased productivity, but also displaced jobs and created new ethical dilemmas.

• Cars gave us the ability to travel farther and faster than ever before, but created huge environmental and safety issues.

The Right Way to Use AI in Business

If you want to mitigate the risks around AI in your business, the solution isn’t to avoid AI; it’s to use it correctly. Here’s how:

1. Hire Good People

AI is only as good as the humans overseeing it. The best way to ensure AI benefits your business is to have knowledgeable, ethical, and skilled employees using it. The best way to run a business has always been to hire good people, give them good tools, and clear obstructions for them, and AI doesn’t change a single thing about that.

2. Create Clear AI Policies

Set guidelines on what AI can and cannot be used for in your organization. Should employees use AI-generated text in marketing? Are they allowed to process customer data with AI tools? Defining these policies upfront helps prevent misuse that could happen even with the absolute best of intentions, and avoids leaving your employees in the dark.

3. Train & Educate

Most AI failures happen due to ignorance, not malice. Teach your employees how AI works, what its limitations are, and how to verify its outputs. Make AI literacy a priority. Training should help your employees understand not only how to use AI, but how to apply your AI policies. You may want to consider telling employees that they are welcome and encouraged to use AI, but only after they’ve completed your first training session or module on AI use.

4. Trust, But Verify

AI can generate useful insights, but they must be checked. Always verify AI-generated content, decisions, and data before relying on them. A little skepticism can prevent major mistakes. AI decisions should be not only accurate, but explainable. You don’t need to know every calculation the AI performed, but you should understand in broad terms how it landed on a decision.

Conclusion: AI is a Tool—The People Using It Matter Most

So, should you trust AI? Still no. But you can trust skilled people to use AI responsibly.

AI isn’t a replacement for human judgment; it’s a tool to augment it. If you want AI to work for you, don’t just implement it blindly. Invest in good people, clear policies, and ongoing education.

Think of AI like a high-powered vehicle. It can get you places faster, but it can also crash spectacularly if you don’t have the right driver. Be the right driver. Hire the right drivers. And always, always check the map before you hit the gas. When you’re deciding what to delegate to AI, think of it like an intern that can stop time – it can do research and writing tasks for you in an instant, but it just doesn’t have the experience and general knowledge you’d want for it to make decisions or post publicly for your organization without oversight.