Most people use AI as a tool, some as a sparring partner, only few as a mirror

Last November, we launched our book Scale versus Soul. During the event, my good friend Peter Hoogland Hoogland was participating in a panel discussion and made an analogy that really inspired me.

He described three ‘modes’ of how people use AI and the more I thought about it, the more I realized how it captures the gap between where most of us are and where the real transformation happens.

Most people use AI as a Tool 🔨

This is where most of us are today. You use AI to get things done. Write an email, generate an image, translate a paragraph, summarize a document, draft a social media post, debug a line of code.

There's nothing wrong with this, it's useful. AI at this interaction mode is a productivity multiplier, a faster way to do what you were already doing. Think of it as a very capable intern who never sleeps and never complains.

It compresses hours into minutes and democratizes capabilities that used to require teams. But productivity is only the first layer.

If you only use AI as a tool, you're essentially outsourcing tasks. You're saving time, not changing your thinking. The input is yours, the output is polished by the machine, and you move on. The person you were before you opened ChatGPT is the same person who closes the tab.

Most people stay here, and most will tell you this is what AI is for, but they're just not seeing the full picture.

Some use AI as a Sparring Partner ⚔️ 

A smaller group of people has discovered something more powerful: AI doesn't just execute, it can truly help you in the thinking process.

At this mode, you're not asking AI to write your strategy deck, you're asking it to tear your strategy apart. You use it to challenge your assumptions, stress-test your logic, and explore angles you hadn't considered. You ask it to play devil's advocate, you run deep research sessions where you go down rabbit holes together, testing hypotheses, finding loopholes, uncovering blind spots.

This is where breakthroughs start to happen. Not because AI has better ideas than you, but because it forces you to defend, refine, and sharpen your own. It's the intellectual equivalent of training with someone who's always ready for another round.

The people using AI at this level are the researchers finding unexpected connections, the entrepreneurs pressure-testing business models before burning cash, the strategists who treat every assumption as something to be proven rather than accepted. They don't just prompt, they debate.

The shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2 isn't about better prompts. It's about a fundamentally different relationship with the technology. You stop treating AI as something that works for you and start treating it as something that reasons with you.

Few people use AI as a Mirror 🪞

And then there's the rarest interaction mode which even fewer practice. At this level, you don't use AI to get things done or to sharpen your thinking. You use it to better understand yourself.

Ask AI questions like:

What patterns do you see in the topics I keep returning to?

If you look at my writing, what themes define my worldview?

Where in our conversations do my arguments contradict themselves?

This is AI as a mirror, a tool for deep reflection, for excavating the layers of who you are, what you believe, and why. You engage with the technology on an soulful level. You use it to question your motivations, your fears, your patterns. You ask it to help you articulate things you've felt but never named.

Using AI as a mirror means going into deep connection and deep reflection. It means using the conversation not to produce something, but to discover something. About yourself. About what makes you irreplaceably human.

Where does your unique perspective come from? What makes your voice different from everyone else's? Where is the line between what you've been taught to think and what you actually believe? What are the emotional undercurrents driving your decisions?

These aren't efficiency questions, these are soul questions.

And in a world where AI can replicate almost any skill, these are the questions that matter most. Because the one thing AI cannot replicate is you, your specific combination of experiences, emotions, contradictions, and convictions. But you have to know what that combination is before you can leverage it.

The people who do this, who use AI not just to work faster or think sharper, but to become more deeply, authentically themselves. A tool makes you more productive. A sparring partner makes you smarter. A mirror makes you more human.

The irony of our age might be this: the most transformative use of artificial intelligence is helping us discover our deeply personal soul that no model can be trained on. We spend endless time debating what AI will do to us, but the more interesting question is what it can help us become.

Answers we will get in abundance, but the skill of the future will be learning how to ask great questions. 

If you want to book me for a keynote or check out my new book ‘Scale vs Soul’, go to www.dadovanpeteghem.com