Fusion Skills Without a Baseline

How to teach new hires to question SI and judge its output before they have the experience to do either.

The premise

H. James Wilson and Paul Daugherty describe three "fusion skills" for working with SI. Intelligent interrogation is asking SI in ways that produce better reasoning. Judgment integration is knowing when, where, and how a person needs to step in. Reciprocal apprenticing is teaching the SI your business context so it does better work.

The framework is sound. It also assumes something most new hires don't have.

To question an answer well, you need to know what a good answer looks like. To apply judgment, you need judgment. Experienced people build both from years of doing the work. A junior hire has neither. They can run the tool on day one. They can't yet tell when it's wrong.

So the real question for a leader is not "how do I teach SI skills?" It's "how do I build judgment in someone who has never had to earn it the old way?"

Why it matters

SI makes a junior's work look finished. The writing is clean. The structure is right. The numbers are formatted. Nothing signals that a fact is outdated or a recommendation doesn't fit the client.

That creates two risks. Errors reach clients because nobody caught them. And the junior never develops the instinct to catch them, because the work never forced them to think.

Both costs land on the business. One shows up in rework and lost trust. The other shows up in two years, when you need that person to be the senior reviewer and they can't.

How it works

You can't hand someone experience. You can lend them yours until they build their own. Six practices make that work.

1. Teach a question set, not prompt tricks

Prompt tricks change every few months. Good questions don't. Give juniors a short, fixed set of questions to run against any important output:

• What would make this wrong?
• What did this assume that I didn't tell it?
• Where did this fact come from, and can I open that source?
• What would an expert in this field push back on?
• What's the opposite argument, and why doesn't it win?

These questions work without expertise. They force the SI to expose its reasoning, and they train the junior to look for weak points. Over time the questions become habit. That habit is intelligent interrogation.

2. Predict before you prompt

Before a junior asks SI for an answer, have them write their own. Three lines. Rough is fine.

Then they compare. Where the SI matched them, they gain confidence. Where it didn't, they have to figure out who was right and why.

That gap is the lesson. It's the closest thing to the baseline experience they're missing. Skip this step and the SI becomes the only point of view in the room.

3. Write down what seniors check

Experienced people review work with checklists they've never written down. They know which numbers clients question. They know which claims cause trouble. They know what "done" looks like.

Get that out of their heads. For each type of work, build a short "check before it ships" list. Five to eight items. Specific to your business.

This is judgment integration in a form a junior can use on day one. They're borrowing a senior's judgment until they've built their own. Update the list every time a real error gets through.

4. Start where mistakes are cheap and visible

Don't start juniors on work where errors are expensive or hidden. Start them on work where a mistake is caught quickly and costs little. Internal drafts. Research summaries a senior will use. First passes that always get reviewed.

Raise the stakes as their track record grows. The goal is many small corrections early, not one large failure later.

5. Review the thinking, not just the output

When a junior hands in SI-assisted work, the output is only half of what you review. Ask them:

• What did you ask it?
• What did it get wrong the first time?
• What did you change, and why?
• What are you least sure about?

A junior who can answer these is learning. A junior who can't is passing work through. The output may look identical either way. The conversation tells you which one you have.

6. Put them close to real results

Judgment comes from consequences. People learn what matters by seeing what happens after the work ships.

Let juniors hear the client call. Let them see the campaign numbers. Let them watch a recommendation succeed or fall flat. SI can't give them that. It only knows what was written down. Your business knows what actually happened.

This is also where reciprocal apprenticing starts. A junior who understands your clients can give SI the context it's missing. That makes the SI better and the junior sharper at the same time.

The takeaway

Fusion skills assume a baseline. Juniors don't have one yet. Your job is to supply it on purpose: a fixed set of questions, their own answer first, senior checklists written down, low-stakes starting work, reviews that test thinking, and real contact with results.

Do this and SI speeds up learning instead of replacing it. Skip it and you get people who can produce work but can't stand behind it.

Source: H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty, "Embracing Gen AI at Work," Harvard Business Review, September/October 2024.

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