Kerris Hougardy: The Skill AI Can't Give You

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"Discernment is knowing when to check at all, and I think that's the most important one."

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Thursday October 29, 2026 · 10:30 AM · Talk

Key ideas from the talk

She opened with two real mushroom poisonings, a nine-year-old in China and a man in his 70s in Japan, to show what happens when people trust a confident answer.
She defines discernment as deciding how much to trust an answer, scaled to the stakes, before you act. A lunch order and a layoff letter need different scrutiny.
A Stanford study from March tested 11 AI systems. The chatbots affirmed users 49 percent more often than other people did.
AI reliability is jagged. The same model can solve a hard problem and fail a simple one, so trust is judged task by task.
Checking is tiring. A BCG study of 1,500 workers found heavy AI oversight brought 12 percent more mental fatigue and 19 percent more information overload.
Her habits are pause, probe, check what can be checked, and own it. She adds three workplace moves: make pushback safe, count the catches, and protect practice reps for junior staff.
In the Q&A she said cross-checking with a second tool and a second human is a core practice.

"Critical thinking is how you check. Judgment is how you decide."
"The answer that it gives you is the answer you have to answer for."
"We keep saying that the future belongs to human skills ... and then we hand people tools that actually reward the opposite. They ask you to give a confident answer, and then just move on."
"As models improve, they're wrong less often. But when they are wrong, they're more convincing about being right."
"Does it make your people braver or does it just make them more compliant?"
"The most human move left is the one AI makes hardest: looking at something that sounds sure and right, and putting your hand up and saying, 'I don't think it is.'"
"My daughter is 21, and she will not use AI at all. ... She is going to be one of those young adults that will have to learn through actual mistakes how to have good judgment and how to be able to apply discernment."