Master These 12 Things and You Have Mastered 95% of AI (AI Essentials 2026)

Andrew Miles Davis returns to a framework he built and taught extensively last year, updating it from the original eight essentials to twelve as he has continued refining how people actually use generative AI. He argues that nearly everything anyone does with a large language model falls into one of these categories: creating content, generating ideas, reformatting, analysing, strategic planning, summarising, optimising, seeking advisory input, exploring scenarios, research and education, asking or being asked questions, and companionship. He flags research and education alongside advisory as the two areas where hallucinations are most likely to cause real damage, given how confidently AI delivers incorrect information in those contexts. Rather than chasing every new tool or model release, Andrew makes the case that mastering these twelve categories covers roughly 95% of practical AI use, and challenges listeners to review their own recent prompts to see the pattern for themselves. Subscribe to In AI Nutshell for daily ten-minute episodes that simplify AI down to what actually matters.