How Do You Evaluate People Who Are "Good at AI"? The ABCD2 Framework
Try asking this in your next team meeting: "Who on our team is the best at using AI?" There will probably be a moment of silence. Someone thinks of the person who uses the tools the most. Someone thinks of the person who's good with prompts. Someone thinks of whoever recently produced something impressive-looking with AI. But none of these answers feels convincing. There's a gut sense that something is off — and yet nobody knows what the right criterion would be. Nearly every company is standing in front of this wall right now. AI competence is rising to the top of hiring and performance criteria, and there's no yardstick to measure it with. This essay proposes one. The short answer is a set of five axes I call ABCD2. But before that, we need to fix the question itself. The very idea of "good at using AI" is wrong The title of this essay says "good at AI" — but that phrasing is itself the trap. The word "using" carries a hidden frame: AI is a tool, and the person is a user. It puts AI on the same shelf as Excel and Photoshop — something you get skilled at operating. On top of that frame, evaluation naturally becomes a measure of tool proficiency. How many features do you know? How fluently do you operate it? But AI is not a hammer. AI is an engine that judges and executes. It's less like a tool and more like a junior colleague you can delegate work to. And once you think of a junior colleague, the frame flips. Behind every junior who performs well, there is invariably a senior who makes them perform well — someone who explains the context of the work, lays out the criteria for judgment, makes it safe to ask about ambiguities, and verifies the output. That senior isn't "using" the junior. They are making the junior do the work well . AI is exactly the same. The person who truly gets the most out of AI is not the person who is good at using AI, but the person who helps AI do the work well. And what do they help with? Two things, broadly. One is knowledge building — pr