This highly practical, full-day workshop brings critical thinking and AI-enabled workflow improvement together. Participants learn how to evaluate their current ways of working, identify appropriate opportunities for AI, create more effective prompts, critically evaluate AI-generated results, and redesign workflows with purposeful human review built in.
This course will earn you 7 PDUs
- Apply critical thinking to AI-assisted work using a structured approach to analysis, questioning, evaluation, and decision-making.
- Identify opportunities for AI within existing workflows by mapping real processes, recognizing friction points, and determining where AI capabilities can add meaningful value.
- Match AI capabilities to business needs by defining the question or problem before selecting how AI should be used.
- Create more effective AI prompts using a five-part structure—Role, Task, Context, Format, and Constraints—grounded in disciplined inquiry rather than trial and error.
- Evaluate AI-generated output critically for accuracy, relevance, completeness, logic, and risk before putting it to use.
- Recognize human and AI-enabled bias, assumptions, and reasoning errors that can affect the quality of AI-supported decisions and work products.
- Apply the LAB framework—Limitations, Assumptions, and Bias—to establish meaningful human review checkpoints in AI-enabled workflows.
- Use the COACHES characteristics of effective critical thinkers, with particular emphasis on Curiosity, Humility, and Objectivity, to support responsible AI use.
- Redesign a real workflow with AI intentionally integrated, including clear human review points and measures of success.
- Identify specific behaviors for improving personal and team AI use after the workshop.
Who should attend AI That Works: Critical Thinking for Smarter Workflows Course
This workshop is designed for mid-level leaders, team leads, and knowledge workers who perform operational work themselves and/or influence how their teams use AI.
It is particularly valuable for professionals who want to move beyond experimenting with AI and develop a more disciplined approach to deciding where to use it, how to use it, and how to evaluate the results.
Prerequisites for AI That Works: Critical Thinking for Smarter Workflows Course
AI That Works: Critical Thinking for Smarter Workflows Course Outline
- Course overview
- Learning objectives review
- Thinking, critical thinking, and AI-assisted thinking
- The opportunities and limitations of AI
- Why AI fluency should not be confused with AI accuracy
- Open-mindedness as a workflow skill
- Explore five practical AI capabilities commonly used in knowledge work
- Exercise: Map your workflow with a critical thinking lens
- Debrief: Identifying Patterns
- Defining the problem before asking AI to solve it
- Applying analysis and logic to AI-assisted work
- Distinguishing a well-formed question from a poorly formed one
- Identifying assumptions hidden inside prompts
- Using follow-up questions to improve both AI output and human reasoning
- Determine how friction points help determine AI appropriateness
- Exercise: Find where AI fits
- Debrief: What information would AI need?
- COACHES model for critical thinking and responsible AI use
- Curiosity
- Objectivity
- Active listening
- Contextualization
- Humility
- Emotional control
- Self-awareness
- How prompts actually work
- Prompt structure in practice
- Exercise: Write and test a real prompt
- Debrief: Determining how to create valuable prompts
- Human review is essential to responsible AI use
- Understanding the LAB framework
- AI fallacies in action
- Exercise: Redesigning the original workflow using the LAB framework
- Debrief: Share lessons learned - before, after, and what changed
- Utilizing the evaluative processes
- Choosing a COACHES characteristic to strengthen
- Course Summary
- Wrap-up


