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Communication used to be the last step. Understand the issue, decide, then explain it to someone else. With artificial intelligence, it moves close to the beginning. A second intelligence is involved while the thinking takes shape, so what is in your head must become clear enough for the machine to work with.
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This is harder than it sounds. What sits in the mind is richer than the words used to describe it. Try describing a photograph so someone could reconstruct it. The light, angle, expressions, and mood can be described, yet something is still missing. The image was understood at once. Language had to break it apart. An intuition about where the work should go is harder, because part of it has no words yet.
Most of us learned to communicate after working something out: explain the decision, defend the conclusion, pass on the result. AI asks us to communicate earlier, while the thought is still incomplete, and make enough of it explicit for another intelligence to work on. Few of us have had real practice at that.
The loss also runs the other way. AI can expand one piece of thinking into many forms in seconds. But where the original is thin, the machine fills the gaps. What was implied becomes stated. What was uncertain sounds settled.
Communication is making sure that the meaning survives compression into language and expansion into output.
This is a capacity, and it develops through use. Do the first round of thinking in your head, the old way, before typing anything. That is your baseline.
Then ask the machine to write the brief back as it understands it. What returns is a mirror. Each gap shows what failed to cross, and reading those gaps is how you stop leaving them.
AI can carry an idea further and faster than ever. Communication decides what arrives.
Frank Ng is a retired NASDAQ CEO, who co-authors this column with his son Ryan after publishing their book Hey AI, Let's Talk!
