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To be more productive, take a nap. To give yourself more creative space, create structure. To get your kids to talk, stop asking so many questions. Some of the best advice in life is counterintuitive, and that applies to AI too. So, in the spirit of offering guidance that really sticks when it comes to working with AI, here are four things not to do—and how to leverage them to get the most out of the technology. 

1. Don’t Be a Stranger 
AI knows some things about you—Copilot, for example, has secure and private access to your work data. But it doesn’t know everything about you. It needs context, guidance, and some “lived” experience with you to deepen and develop that informational relationship. So don’t use it like you would a calculator that will just blindly spit out answers; treat it like a colleague, like someone who will eventually get to know you. 

For example, if you ask AI what’s a priority in your inbox, it can give you a much more dialed-in answer if you tell it that your top priority is emails from your manager. For someone else, it might be messages about something they’ve been asked to do multiple times in the past week. 

2. Don’t Use It Like a Search Engine 
For the most part, the first prompt you drop in the chat box is not going to deliver quite what you need, and that’s okay. Copilot conversations are more of a continuous interaction than a binary exercise: the goal is to get it as right as possible in the first response, and then to get closer and closer to right. Here are two ways to get the highest value responses from AI:  

  • Think about your thinking. What outcome do you want from the email you’re asking AI to write? What tone should you strike? What beats or steps would you like the result to contain? Be explicit to yourself about the pieces of a task you want to accomplish and why you want to accomplish them.

  • Have a conversation, like you would with a trusted colleague. Microsoft research shows that asking AI to challenge you, rather than obey your command, can yield much richer results. Give some feedback and try asking in different ways. Don’t be afraid to riff, asking for different tones, lengths, and audiences, then picking and choosing from the results. 

3. Don’t Stop with the Low-Hanging Fruit 
One of the most common ways people use Copilot is to find documents, like the PowerPoint your colleague shared in that meeting the other day. But you’re never just looking for a document to find the document, full stop. You’re probably looking for it to find the answer to a question. Think about every task you do as part of a larger system—think about the whole tree, not just the branch. How could you use AI to rethink your strategy and business process? How could it even take on parts of that business process for you, like analyzing invoices or answering first-line HR queries? 
 
4. Don’t Forget to Mess Around 
The more you experiment with AI—even when you don’t have a specific goal in mind—the better and more sophisticated your interactions will become. Keep a growth mindset and spend time messing around to see what works and what doesn’t. 

Think of it like learning to play jazz. While it’s essential to start with some structured lessons and tried-and-true techniques, the real magic happens when you begin to experiment and explore on your own.