The new language of the workplace: Knowing how to ask AI questions is more important than using it

At a high school in Barcelona, 28-year-old teacher Ivan Ortega creates an exam in just over 15 minutes. His 50-something colleague takes an hour. The difference lies not in the experience or dedication of these teachers, but in how each has mastered conversing with artificial intelligence. While Ortega formulates requests with precision, his colleague is aware of an invisible barrier — not a digital divide, but a linguistic one.

The skill of giving detailed instructions to AI has ceased to be a technical resource and has become the key to efficiency and a new factor in professional stratification. It is no longer about those who use the technology and those who do not, but those who know how to speak to the machine and those who don’t. What began as an amateur trick has become a differentiating element in the workplace, generating a more subtle and powerful asymmetry than the mere possession of tools.

“The biggest change is cultural, not technological,” explains Ignasi Llorente, CEO of the strategic consultancy Utopiq, which specializes in AI-driven changes. “Organizations are discovering that artificial intelligence is not just another tool, it is a new work language.”

The quality of the request

AI evolution has been dizzying. In just three years, the landscape has gone from initial skepticism to an obvious fear of being left behind, reaching a point of “unstoppable transversality,” according to Llorente. Universal access to tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini have not led to homogenization, but to a new skills gap. The value no longer lies in the tool, but in the mind that guides it.

The secret to prompting is not to write instructions, but to think them over before writing them, Llorente says. It is a skill that managers, teachers, journalists and administrators will end up needing. “In a world where everyone has access to the same machine, the advantage is in the quality of the questions,” he says. Knowing how to guide a model to solve a complex problem requires “clarity, synthesis, criteria and understanding of the context.” It is, in essence, a new form of leadership.

This skill is transforming jobs and driving a quiet but massive reconversion. In the technical field, highly specialized roles have integrated AI prompts into their day-to-day work. José Torró, a 26-year-old engineer at DevOps, a software development method, says that, although a well-constructed command can automate tasks that previously required hours, technical mastery is still irreplaceable. “If I don’t have knowledge of networks, architecture and development, inevitably what AI gives me will have nothing to do with what I want to do.”

Generation gap

The shift is also particularly intense in the field of education, the primary battleground of this transition. Anna Sánchez Caballé, an educational technology professor at Jaume I University in Spain, says that AI prompting must be integrated as a key digital skill, especially in secondary school curriculums, where “research, critical thinking and reflection skills” are consolidated.

The resistance among teachers, she observes, often “comes from a lack of time and resources,” rather than a suspicion of AI. “An important and growing segment of teachers is deeply implicated,” she says. A generational gap, however, exists. Professor Ortega says that in his school, teachers with more experience tend to use AI less than him. And those who use it don’t seem to be acquainted with “the infinite solutions it offers.” The advice he gives to a 50-year-old colleague is simple: “Offer context and tell it clearly what you want in the most direct and efficient way possible.”

But the transition is not always voluntary or organic. In some sectors, implementation comes as an order from above. A 55-year-old administrative worker in the transportation sector recounts how management told everyone in her company to write emails using Gemini. The reaction was negative, with many experiencing the request as a kind of veiled criticism: “What’s going on? Do you think I don’t know how to write?”

Although its use is not mandatory, the tacit pressure is there. This administrative worker has personally found it helps with tasks that previously kept her up at night, such as writing justifications or memos. “Now I have a head start and I dedicate myself to polishing the text,” she explains. Still, it poses an ethical and practical dilemma: “If both the writer and the reviewer use AI, certain requirements, such as asking for detailed reports on the need for a specific action, can be lost.”

Beyond the skills gap, experts and professionals warn of a parallel and perhaps more significant risk: that of dependency and unlearning. Torró warns of an alarming trend among younger professionals particularly: “People have stopped thinking; they turn to AI for absolutely everything,” he says. To illustrate this, he recounts a crucial meeting with managers in which the future of an important tool was discussed. “They had ChatGPT open on the screen during the discussion. In the end, no conclusion was reached. They delegated the decision to AI.”

This indicates a loss of capacity for analysis and deliberation and is the dark side of hyper efficiency. Llorente identifies the greatest corporate risk as believing that AI only serves to “do the same old thing, but faster and cheaper.” Companies that stay in that phase of basic automation will “be left behind.” The real potential, he says, is “to amplify individual capacities and multiply those of the entire organization.”

New basic literacy

Faced with this situation, experts are calling for a decisive training commitment. “Knowing how to work with AI is no longer an extra: it is the new digital literacy,” says Llorente, who points out that the future AI law in the European Union will make “AI literacy mandatory in all sectors.”

Caballé advocates integration in the school curriculum, similar to reading comprehension. “I don’t think AI prompting will become a specific subject; rather it will evolve into a symbiosis between humans and machines.”

What human skills become more valuable in this new ecosystem? Llorente says the answer is creativity. In a world where everyone can produce similar content, “genuinely original ideas will be golden.” AI will replace the skills of executing tasks, so the supreme value will lie in “those who are able to think of powerful, original, relevant and different concepts.”

The future of work is no longer just about academic degrees; it is about clarity and the depth of the questions we are capable of formulating. The new frontier is not only technological, but also cognitive and linguistic. In the AI economy, the power will be held by those who master the art of questioning the machine. And the price of not learning this new language could well be professional irrelevance. AI prompting is no longer just a command, it’s the new lingo needed to navigate tomorrow’s world.

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