Most people who struggle with AI are not struggling with the technology. They are struggling with communication.
That distinction matters. Communication is something you already know how to improve.
Here is the pattern I see across organizations: someone opens an AI tool, types a quick request, gets something back that is technically correct but practically useless, and concludes that AI is overhyped. What they actually produced is workslop, output that is polished on the surface and hollow underneath.
The two things you keep leaving out
When you sit down to use AI, you already know what you want done. That is the task, and it is the only piece most people include. What they leave out are context and intent.
Context is orientation: who is this for, what is the situation, what constraints matter. Intent is purpose: what does success actually look like.
Walk into a running store and say "I need running shoes." You get a wall of options. Say "I have low arches, a $200 budget, and I'm training for a marathon." Now the person helping you can actually help you. Context narrows the space. Intent points at the outcome.
This sounds simple. It is not.
There is a cognitive trap called the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, you cannot remember what it felt like not to know it. Your situation feels obvious to you. You assume the other party shares your history, your institutional memory, your sense of what "good" looks like.
With colleagues, shared history fills in the gaps. AI has no shared history. No corridor conversations. No years of working alongside your team. It is the most low-context entity you will ever interact with. Everything it does not know, it will guess. And its guesses will be polished, confident, and wrong.
When intent goes missing, results look like success
Here is the part that surprises people. Misaligned intent does not always look like failure. Sometimes it looks like results.
Klarna replaced much of their customer service team with AI and gave it one clear directive: keep call times low. The AI was extraordinarily good at it. And it eroded customer relationships in the process. The real intent, building trust and making customers feel heard, was never stated. The AI optimized exactly what it was told to optimize. That is what happens when intent stays in your head instead of in the instruction.
Think about a time you delegated something and got back work that was technically correct but missed the point entirely. That is the same gap. The person (or the AI) did what you asked. They just did not know what you meant.
The two-sentence fix
Before any AI task, add two sentences. One for context: who is this for and what is the situation. One for intent: what does success look like and why does it matter here.
Most of the rework you are doing right now is the cost of skipping them.
The bottom line
This is not a new skill. You have been doing context engineering every time you briefed a new hire, wrote a project brief, or explained why a decision mattered. AI did not create the communication gap. It made the cost of that gap immediate and visible, every single time.