More Info — Lesson 10: AI at Work, Skills That Matter, and Energy Use
This page goes deeper on the ideas from Lesson 10 — how AI is being used across different industries, what skills are becoming more valuable, and what to make of AI's energy footprint.
How AI is being used across industries
AI chatbots and related tools are already embedded in many workplaces. Here's a realistic picture — not hype, not fear — of what's actually happening in different fields:
Healthcare
AI tools help draft clinical notes, summarize patient records, flag potential drug interactions, and assist with medical coding. Doctors are not being replaced — but some of the documentation burden is shifting. Patients can also use consumer AI tools to understand diagnoses or prepare questions for appointments. Important caveat: medical decisions still require a real clinician.
Legal
Law firms use AI to review contracts, search case law, summarize documents, and draft initial versions of routine legal forms. Again, the lawyer still makes judgments — AI is handling the time-consuming text work. Self-represented individuals are also using AI to understand legal language, though with the important caveat that legal advice from a chatbot should be verified with an actual attorney.
Education
Teachers are using AI to generate lesson plan drafts, differentiate materials for different reading levels, and create practice questions. Students are using it as a study tool. There are real debates happening in schools about how and when student AI use is appropriate.
Customer service
Many customer service interactions that used to involve a human — answering common questions, processing routine requests, providing status updates — are now handled by AI systems. Human agents still handle complex or sensitive situations.
Business writing and communication
Emails, reports, meeting summaries, presentations, marketing copy — a significant portion of workplace writing is now written with AI assistance, then reviewed and edited by people. This is probably the most widespread current use.
Retail and finance
Product recommendations, fraud detection, loan application screening, and customer personalization all use AI in the background — often without the customer knowing. This is a different kind of AI (not a chatbot) but worth knowing about.
What skills are becoming more valuable
This is the question people most want answered: Will AI take my job?
The honest answer is: AI is changing jobs more than it's eliminating them, and the changes are uneven. Some tasks within jobs are automating. Others — especially ones involving judgment, relationships, specialized expertise, and handling the unexpected — are not.
Skills that AI makes more valuable:
Judgment and critical thinking. As AI produces more content, the ability to evaluate it — to spot errors, notice bias, ask the right follow-up questions — becomes more important, not less. Someone who can tell a good AI output from a bad one is more valuable than someone who just accepts whatever was generated.
Communication. AI can draft. You decide what to say and to whom. The ability to know what message should be sent, what tone is right, and what a specific person or audience needs — that's human.
Domain expertise. A chatbot can discuss medicine, law, finance, or engineering in general terms. A professional with real expertise knows when the chatbot is wrong, oversimplifying, or missing the nuance that matters. Deep knowledge in a field remains valuable precisely because it lets you supervise AI output intelligently.
Relationship and trust. People hire contractors they trust. They vote for politicians they believe in. They open up to counselors they feel safe with. These relationships don't transfer to AI.
Prompt literacy. The ability to work with AI effectively — knowing how to ask useful questions, how to redirect a bad response, how to verify output — is becoming a practical workplace skill. It's not complicated, but people who develop it will use AI more effectively than those who don't.
AI energy use in context
You may have heard that AI uses a lot of electricity. That's true at the industry level — training large models, running data centers, and cooling the hardware that runs AI services worldwide consumes significant energy. This is a legitimate issue that AI companies and researchers are actively working on.
For your individual use, the picture is more proportionate:
| Activity | Approximate energy use | |---|---| | One chatbot conversation (several messages) | Similar to a few web searches | | An hour of chatbot use | Roughly comparable to an hour of streaming video | | Training a large AI model (once, by a company) | Very large — equivalent to transcontinental flights |
The big energy numbers come from training models and from the aggregate use across hundreds of millions of users — not from individual conversations. For a typical patron using a chatbot for an hour at the library, the energy footprint is in the same range as the other digital activities you do every day.
This is worth being aware of, and it's fair to factor into how you think about AI companies' environmental responsibilities. But it's not a reason for an individual user to feel guilty about asking a chatbot to help draft a letter.
The bottom line
AI is not a coming wave — it's already woven into how many industries work. The people who will navigate this best aren't those who avoid AI or those who trust it blindly, but those who understand it well enough to use it as a tool: knowing its limits, verifying what matters, and applying their own expertise and judgment on top of what it produces. That's exactly what this course has been about.