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TL;DR Using AI well isn’t about doing more—it’s about automating the boring work so you can spend more time on the work that requires creativity, judgment, and human connection.
1. Give AI repetitive tasks that consume time but add little value. 2. Use better prompts and workflows to get more useful results. 3. Keep human judgment at the center of meaningful ministry work. |
Episode Summary
In this insightful solo episode, Kenny Jahng reflects on his journey using AI tools over the past several years. Drawing from personal experience, Kenny Jahng distills five core lessons for maximizing the benefits of AI—making you faster at tedious work and better at the tasks that truly matter. From the importance of clarity and personal judgment to treating AI as a partner (not just a tool), Kenny Jahng provides practical wisdom for leaders and knowledge workers eager to leverage AI without losing their distinct value.
Key Topics Discussed
- Evolution of AI in Everyday Work
Kenny Jahng shares how AI shifted from a novelty to an essential part of his daily workflow, now open almost all the time when working 00:00:49.
- Lesson 1: Clarity is Key
AI can only amplify the clarity you bring. If your thoughts are fuzzy, AI will return fuzzy results 00:02:05. You must be clear about your objectives before prompting AI.
- Lesson 2: The Importance of Human Judgment
The most valuable skill isn’t prompt crafting, but applying your own expertise to evaluate AI outputs 00:04:04. AI produces confidence, but discernment determines value.
- Lesson 3: AI Excels at the 80%—You Finish the Last Mile
AI is great for rough drafts and rapid ideation, but the final polish relies on your intervention 00:06:42.
- Lesson 4: Make AI Argue With You
Don’t accept output at face value—treat AI as a sparring partner, asking it to poke holes in your logic for deeper insights 00:08:44.
- Lesson 5: Guard Your Discernment
The biggest risk is outsourcing your thinking to AI and losing the muscle of discernment 00:12:04. Deliberate growth, reflection, and collaboration with humans are essential.
Notable Quotes
“AI is only as clear as you are yourself.” 00:02:05
“Your judgment is the skill that matters the most.” 00:04:04
“AI sprints with you… But that last mile, the last half mile is the crazy hard part that’s on you.” 00:06:42
“You must make AI argue with you. You have to pick a fight.” 00:08:44
“The real risk is outsourcing your discernment at the end of the day.” 00:12:04
“Is it making me wiser or is it making me busier? That’s a question I’m constantly asking.” 00:16:45
Resources & Recommendations
- Google NotebookLM: Mentioned as a tool for building personas, creating a board of advisors, and setting up AI as a more challenging counterpart 00:10:48.
- Personal Growth Practices: Kenny Jahng emphasizes the importance of reading books, listening to podcasts, and learning from real experts, beyond AI-generated responses 00:13:52.
- Encouragement to Connect: Listeners are invited to share their own lessons or questions about AI by emailing kenny@churchtechtoday.com 00:17:07.
For more episodes and resources, visit Church Tech Today.
Let me know if you need these notes in a different format or want summaries for additional recordings!
About the Church Tech Today Podcast:
The Church Tech Today Podcast helps pastors, church staff, and ministry leaders navigate the intersection of faith and technology with confidence. Hosted by Kenny Jahng and brought to you by www.FrontDoor.church.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Kenny Jahng [00:00:01 – 00:00:49]:
It’s that time again. Kenny Jahng here with the Church Tech Today podcast. And today I was reflecting on all the things that I’ve learned by using AI tools day in and day out over the last several years. Three to four years ago, I started AI in this journey, and today I’m in a completely different place. And I’d like to pay it forward and share some of these lessons. And so today I to want, I wanted to sit down with you and share five lessons that I’ve learned about using AI well, that I think is going to make you faster at the boring work and better at the work that matters. Okay, so let’s rewind the clock basically back into GPT came out of the gate and AI was a novelty, right? We all poked at it between real tasks. We didn’t know where it fit in our workflows.
Kenny Jahng [00:00:49 – 00:02:04]:
But now in 2026, I can confidently tell you, if you were basically over my shoulder all day, every day, AI sits right smack in the middle of my work on my computer. It is how I write, it is how I plan it, is how I work through problems all day long. And I think the fact that now AI is open pretty much all the time, that I have a laptop in front of me, that much time with any tool, I, I think is going to teach you things that, you know, when the first tool, when the tools first came out and there was all this hype that, you know, it’s just not relevant anymore. None of it, of that hype has to do with, you know, what are the prompting tricks or secret templates that we have to use today. None of that is relevant today. So I was reflecting this morning and jotted down five core lessons that I think is going to be helpful for anybody who’s earlier on the journey. So I’m talking to myself two or three years ago, that version of me, and let’s just get right to it. Okay, so lesson one is AI is only as clear as you are yourself.
Kenny Jahng [00:02:05 – 00:03:04]:
This is, I think, something that a lot of beginning users just miss because it’s so easy to look at it as almost like a crutch. Just dump all your thoughts in it and it’s going to clarify everything. AI is actually not going to give you clarity that you yourself don’t already have on what you’re thinking about. So you have to sit down knowing exactly what you want to say, because the tool is going to move fast, it’s going to superficially clean it up. And so if you actually know what you want to say, it’s going to help you clarify that message or that thinking. If you sit down for fuzzy minded, you’ve got a cloudy head and you put it all into the AI, it’s gonna hand back fuzzy, cloudy stuff right back at you. And you know what? It’s gonna do it with a confident voice, which is worse than getting nothing at all sometimes in my mind. So the real world with the real work that you have to do yourself is getting clear.
Kenny Jahng [00:03:04 – 00:03:37]:
That’s your responsibility. That’s you before your fingers hit the keyboard. Prompting itself, I think only carries whatever clarity that you walk in with. Basically like you have to do the work before you get to the computer. So before I open any AI tool now, I have to ask myself this one question first. And that is, what am I trying to say here? What’s the controlling idea? You have to be ruthless. You can’t be all over the place. You can’t try to have multiple objectives.
Kenny Jahng [00:03:37 – 00:04:15]:
You need to have clarity. So I’m trying to boil down, what is the point? I always say smart leaders have it all backwards. If you study smart leaders, they have it all backwards. And that just means what is the point? What are you trying to do? You force yourself to get to that controlling idea before you start working with AI. Lesson two, lesson two is that your judgment is the skill that matters the most. Everyone wants that perfect prompt. They want. They’re trying to figure out how to get the most polished, the best piece out there, the thing that sounds the best.
Kenny Jahng [00:04:16 – 00:05:24]:
I think all of all that tips, tricks, they help marginally, but they don’t decide at the end of the day whether the work that the output is actually good or not. This is where your human eyes, your own expertise is really needed. AI is going to hand you 10 versions of anything, 20 versions, unlimited versions, and what you’ll find is, in my experience, most of them are just mediocre. And again, all of them are going to sound confident. So in that world of confident options, you’re going to need to know which one holds up to your actual judgment at the end. That’s the conclusion. And the only place that’s going to come, that’s going to come from is years of learning and paying attention to what actually works the tool can generate all day. But knowing what’s worth keeping, what’s worth discarding, what’s worth realigning, redirecting, that’s what matters.
Kenny Jahng [00:05:24 – 00:06:12]:
So this is almost like the offline rule of life. You have to become a craftsman on your own topic. You need to become that deep nerd who knows your field, your study, your area of expertise, you need to know it stone cold. And that’s rare right now. And I think it’s going to become even more rare because everyone is lazy. It matters more now than it ever has. And for those of you or those of us willing to roll up our sleeves and do the work, I think we’re lucky. Because you can’t shortcut that 10,000 hours it takes to become someone who can really judge excellence to the level of, say, a multi star Michelin chef.
Kenny Jahng [00:06:12 – 00:06:57]:
Right? Like you need to be the absolute nerd. AI at the end of the day is not going to shorten the pathway to becoming that expert. If anything, I think AI is going to make people who’ve made it more valuable and at the same time make almost like an exposure of the gap even greater between those who really are experts and those who really aren’t. At the end of the day. Okay, lesson number three. Lesson three is that AI sprints with you like it’s a co runner with you. And it’s going to go fast for the first 80%, but getting to the finish line is the hard part. It’s like running a marathon.
Kenny Jahng [00:06:57 – 00:08:00]:
That last mile, the last half mile is the crazy hard part that’s on you. So for me, AI is going to get me a rough draft faster than anything I’ve ever used before, right? But at the end, when you’re trying to get it perfect, at some point, you can’t keep delegating to it, you can’t keep asking for iterations. It just doesn’t get it at the end, it stalls. So that last stretch is where you need to actually be fully invested in the work yourself. Almost like turning it into manual mode, getting rid of the AI and just taking over, pounding on the keyboard and making it perfect, whatever it might be. And at the end of the day, that last 1% is the thing that you’re going to be judged on, the thing that makes everything visible. It’s going to make or break the trust in the actual piece that you put out and that stretches pure judgment about which lines sound like a human and which needs to go. That is the part at the end, the last 1% is the most critical.
Kenny Jahng [00:08:00 – 00:08:39]:
Even though you can create volumes of work and things like that, that last 1% is what matters. Readers are going to feel it, right? They’re going to see. They may not, I don’t know, they can’t necessarily like point out exactly where it falls apart for them, but they’re going to know and they’re going to get the sense of, ah, this is not really you. So Anyway, that last 1% is really critical. So AI is great at the 80%. It’s the 8020 rule. So you need to use it, exploit it all over the place for the 80%. But then that last mile is you can’t let AI do it.
Kenny Jahng [00:08:39 – 00:09:08]:
You have to take over and finish it. Okay, lesson number four. Lesson number four is that you must make AI argue with you. You have to pick a fight. That’s lesson number four. And that’s one of the biggest shifts in the last couple years of not just using it as a transactional machine. Like I’m putting in a request and I get something back. But you have to treat it like a thinking partner, a sparring partner.
Kenny Jahng [00:09:08 – 00:10:02]:
So like early on, right. I think all of us in the beginning of our AI journeys, we just give it orders and you ask it to write something, summarize a doc, spit out 10 options, build something for you. What you get back is useful, but at the end of the day, it is average of average. It’s shallow, right? The real depth starts showing when you can actually push back and then it can push back on you. You start arguing with it back and forth. I personally seek out and make it poke holes in my logic and tell me what I’m missing, right? So when you’re asking it to proactively look at the logic, look at the consistency, take the point of view of an opponent, make it push back. I’m basically asking it to require me to defend the answer. That’s, I think, where the gold comes out.
Kenny Jahng [00:10:03 – 00:11:04]:
So, you know, we all know that the reputation of these AIs are that they’re sycophantic, right? That’s a common knock on AI that basically just agrees with you, tells you what you want to hear, that you know, you’re great. This is, this is perfect. That sycophantic response is what it’s kind of entrained on, right? That’s good. But that’s not the only modality that you can have with it. It really depends on how you set up the thing. You can give it specific standard expectations that you want. You need it to challenge you, that you cannot just accept everything that I give it, you know, I give to you as an AI machine and you wanted to put it to work like so. For example, you could use tools like Google NotebookLM and build these Personas and feed it all of the expertise and create a board of advisors or an accountability partner with the explicit Modality of a willing suspension of disbelief.
Kenny Jahng [00:11:04 – 00:12:11]:
We don’t want to assume everything is correct. And let’s just stress test this from different angles and make sure that the best ideas win. If you’re able to set it up that way, that same tool that everyone else out there calls the yes man and says it’s so sycophantic that turns into a sparring partner who first of all never gets tired and is not lazy in poking holes and pushing and prodding and finding the accountability points. And first of all, the other thing is that it doesn’t take it personally, right? So it’s just methodical. And that is the voice that you want to hear, right? It can become one of the most honest voices that you actually have with all of your ideas, of all your thinking, of all your directives, whether it is strategy and plans for your team or feedback for projects, this is the best accountability partner sounding board that you can have. Okay, lesson number five, five out of five. Lesson number five is that the real risk is outsourcing your discernment at the end of the day. And this is trite.
Kenny Jahng [00:12:11 – 00:13:17]:
You hear this a lot, but this is what I really mean, right? This is, I think, the longest lesson for most people to see. And I will say I’m still wrestling with it on a daily basis, right? The more you lean on AI, the easier it gets to basically quit doing that slow internal work, the thinking, the wrestling, all of that hard work that happens on only when you’re sitting there with a hard problem long enough to work through it. Sometimes it’s not about just finding the right answers or the finding the right tools or the frameworks or the thinking. Sometimes you have to sit with something and let it stew and let your brain marinate on it until you find the breakthroughs. And that discernment is the thing that makes you irreplaceable as a human, right? A tool that does your thinking for you over time. Given of time, it’s going to weaken your ability to think at all. And that’s true for writing especially. So when you’re thinking about your daily work, discernment needs to be a part of it.
Kenny Jahng [00:13:18 – 00:14:06]:
And I’ve learned that I have to keep a hard line on it, right? AI helps me get more work done. But I think internally I need to. I don’t know, I need to figure out these practices where I have to keep growing as a leader. I need to keep learning. All of that is something that I have to prioritize, and I have to find out how to Keep that going. And in, in my mind, that needs to be something that has called out that’s a little bit purposeful, that’s intentional. What are you doing to keep those muscles alive and staying growth minded on purpose? I’m doubling down on reading books and listening to podcasts and learning from people who are the real experts in the field. Instead of just going to AI and saying what should I do? What are the best practices? And this is something I’ve done for years.
Kenny Jahng [00:14:07 – 00:15:39]:
Push yourself to go outside your own niche or your industry. You need to figure out how to listen to or read or be exposed to what leaders in completely different industries are doing so that you can have pattern recognition and pull in the transferable parts back to your own work. That brain activity of growth and learning, that muscle, I think it’s sharpened also. When other people are in the room, right, Other leaders, we always say you are the average of the five people that you surround yourself with. So can you find people that are smarter than you, that are more dynamic than you, that have more experience and wisdom in different areas than you? Not just people that are in your lane, Soundboarding, masterminding, working through problems, Live with other people, especially people that you trust and that have your back and the people that are willing to tell you the truth, that have safe spaces, that’s something I think you must, must, must figure out how to double down on. You can’t let that go. So if you know again, if you lead a church, if you lead a non profit, if you lead a company, you have to guard this part of it. Because not only is ChatGPT sycophantic, but sometimes as you grow as a leader, as you ascend the ladder, more and more people that are reporting to you, your supporters are, they’re yes men, right? And so you need, I don’t know, you need people that are willing to grow you or grow with you or help you grow.
Kenny Jahng [00:15:39 – 00:17:06]:
At the end of the day, your people, your team, need a leader who can still tell true things from I don’t know what just what’s loud, right? Sometimes what’s loud or what is just popular is the thing that gets voted the thing to move forward. That’s not always the case. So the real risk is outsourcing your discernment where you really don’t understand the nuances and what should be greenlit and what should not. Okay, three or four years in, those are five lessons, I think, that have allowed me to use AI in way that makes me faster in almost everything I do. But at the same time making me a person where I am better at the work that matters. Right? So I’m kind of offloading some of the brain capacity to things that are tedious, and then that reserves that brain power, that capacity for thinking through and focusing on the things that actually will accelerate and turbocharge the value that I bring to the table. So is it making me wiser or is it making me busier? That’s a question I’m constantly asking together. What do you think? What are some lessons that you have in terms of letting AI work for you better at the boring parts of work and making you better at the parts that matter? I’d love to hear from you.
Kenny Jahng [00:17:07 – 00:17:37]:
Give me a shout out@kennyurchtechtoday.com and otherwise. Thanks for being on this journey with me. I would love to hear what are the things about AI you want to learn about? What’s the next stages that you want to open, the doors that you feel like there’s just a hurdle in front of you? Because those are the things that inspire me and lets me curate the resources and the thinking that I can share back with you and the community. Thanks for listening today. I’ll catch you here next time on the podcast.
