In an AI economy, the durable advantage isn’t fluency with the tools—it’s the ability to think clearly and say exactly what you mean.
GUEST COLUMN | by Jason Robinovitz
Ask most parents which skill will matter most in an AI economy and they’ll say coding. For the moment that’s about half right: the people getting the most out of these systems are still largely programmers who understand how the system works. But a shift is underway. You operate these tools with words, not code: you don’t program them so much as talk to them, and what they hand back is only ever as good as what you put in. As they mature and begin to natively optimize themselves, the advantage of using the tool is best taken by a different kind of person: the one who can lay out a thought in organized, exact detail by asking for precisely the right thing.
‘…lay out a thought in organized, exact detail by asking for precisely the right thing.’
That demand is no longer hypothetical. A Wharton survey last fall found that 82 percent of employees now use generative AI at least once a week, and two-thirds of business leaders said they wouldn’t hire someone who couldn’t use it at all. The trouble is what people imagine “using it” means. It is not button-pushing. The bottleneck is whether the person in front of it knows what to ask for and can then tell good work from bad.
Thinking Made Visible
Writing has always been thinking made visible. A muddled sentence is usually a muddled thought, and the work of fixing the sentence is the work of fixing the thought. What has changed is that writing is now also the control panel for the most powerful instrument most people will ever touch.
The student who can say precisely what she wants, recognize when the answer is wrong, and articulate why, is doing the one thing the machine cannot do for her, because clear thinking is the very thing she would be asking it to supply. That capacity manifests as a writing skill long before it appears as a technical one, and we teach it the slow way, through years of drafting and revision, with no shortcut that survives contact with real work.
This is also the difference between AI that helps a student and AI that replaces him. Used as a sparring partner, the tool sharpens a thought; used as a ghostwriter, it removes the reason to have one. Same software, opposite result; the variable is never the machine, but what the user brings to it.
Put the Process Back at the Center
This is why teachers should be watching the process, not only grading the product. Here they have more visibility than they realize. Have students do their work in a single Google Doc: notes, brainstorming, outline, and essay all in one place. A free Chrome extension called DraftBack will then replay the writing of that document, from the first blank line to the final draft. An essay that grew over days, full of false starts and paragraphs shuffled into order, looks nothing like one that appeared in a single paste at 11:40 the night before. The first is a student thinking on the page; the second came straight from a chatbot, and the revision history shows it plainly.
The aim isn’t to run forensics on teenagers. It is to put mindwork back at the center, because the mindwork is the part that teaches.
Once a student has learned to do it the right way, then, and only then, does AI become an accelerant instead of a substitute. You cannot judge a piece of writing as good or bad until you are capable of writing something good or bad yourself.
The Foundation Beneath Fluency
None of this is an argument against technology, and it certainly isn’t nostalgia. I run schools, and I want our students to be fluent with the tools they will be expected to command. Fluency rests on a foundational ability to think a problem through and say exactly what you mean about it. Build that, and almost any tool becomes an extension of a working mind.
So the advice I would give a fourteen-year-old today is the same advice my teachers were giving me over thirty years ago, even though the ground underneath it has shifted completely. Become a strong writer first. It is the rare credential artificial intelligence can neither issue nor revoke. The schools that understand this won’t be the ones boasting the longest list of tools, but rather the ones whose students can still say exactly what they mean, and know when they haven’t.
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Jason Robinovitz is CEO/COO & General Counsel of Score At The Top Learning Centers, Score Academy, and JRA Educational Consulting. An attorney turned education executive, he has led significant growth of the family-built organization and writes weekly on K-12 reform, college admissions, executive function, and the responsible use of AI in education. Connect with Jason on LinkedIn.
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