This week, I stepped into a classroom at The Ohio State University to deliver the first lecture of my undergraduate course on AI. I was immediately struck by the energy of the students. These are true AI pioneers; they aren’t waiting for a syllabus to tell them how to use these tools. They are already using them to navigate their daily lives with a passion that I find genuinely inspiring.
However, as we discussed in this opening session, being a pioneer is not enough. There is a systemic danger in becoming a permanent passenger in a vehicle you don’t yet know how it work, what it can do, or how to fly it like a Top Gun.
My mission this semester (and the core mission of Right Brain Labs) is to move these students from the back seat using AI on autopilot to the cockpit. This course is fundamentally about Human-AI collaboration. We aren’t just studying a technology; we are studying a partnership and a symbiosis. To avoid cognitive surrender by outsourcing thinking to AI and go beyond learning How to use AI to How to think with AI. Over the next 14 weeks we will weave between the equipping students with core skills that show students how to think better and showing them how to supercharge those skills with AI. The primary design principle for this course is show don’t tell and avoid consultant speak at all costs.
This week’s lecture “The Awakening: Shifting from Passive User to AI Pilot” started with a look behind what they knew how to do (prompt a chatbot to get answers) and break it down by giving them a look at what’s behind the facade. This week we introduced the metaphor of AI as the aircraft.
The Anatomy of the Craft
To facilitate this transition, we are using the Aviation of AI framework. This week, we identified the primary components of the vehicle:
The LLM is the Engine: This provides the raw power and thrust. Like a jet engine, it is a marvel of engineering, but it is indifferent to your destination. It functions on probabilistic patterns, providing momentum without inherent intent.
The Chatbot is the Cockpit: Platforms like Gemini or Claude are the interfaces where the human sits to direct that power. They are fully functional aircraft, but they often have a performance ceiling designed for general use. They make flight look so easy that it’s tempting to never look under the hood.
The Advanced Avionics: Human Cognitive Skills
As we progress through the semester, we will discuss various controls in the cockpit such as system prompts, tokens, memory, and context windows to help them understand the aircraft they are flying and show how these lessons transfer into more complex aircraft (Agentic AI, Enterprise AI solutions etc.). However, the main focus will be on training the Pilot by giving them the techniques and skills required to be a Top Gun. These are the “advanced avionics” of the human-AI partnership.
The aircraft is only as effective as the pilot. We will show them how to think critically, solve complex problems, enable flow, reimagine solutions using design thinking, and tell better stories. We want the students to learn, to iterate, to listen with empathy and to stay agile as the technology and the mission evolve.
The Goal: Improve Flow
The ultimate objective of mastering these skills is to apply the principles of Lean Management to everything we do. We aren’t using AI to simply generate more “noise.” We are using it to improve Flow, the seamless movement of an idea from conception to a finished product that delivers real value to the consumer.
When we reimagine value delivery through this lens, AI becomes a tool to clear the bottlenecks in our cognitive workflows and reimagine how we do what we do. But this requires a pilot who understands both the engine and the mission. If we lose the muscle of critical inquiry, we aren’t pilots; we are just observers of a process we no longer control.
The Leadership Challenge
This is the same challenge I pose to the corporate leaders I advise: Don’t just be a passenger in someone else’s “rental” aircraft. To build a future of sustainable innovation, you must invest in the human skills of collaboration as much as the technology itself.
We are teaching these students at Fisher College of Business to be the pilots of the future. Each week, I’ll share a brief update as we layer on the complexities of flight. The goal is to give them superpowers, but they, and you must be the ones in the pilot’s seat to use them.