In April of 2025, I wrote that people with better taste would always get more out of the same AI tools that everyone else is using. But what about people with more education?

By now, I’m guessing you see people using LLMs in the workplace every single day of your life, am I right? From emails, to pitch decks, to your CTO’s latest version of Flappy Bird she made with your company logo, who’s getting the most utility out of these tools, really?

Since I wrote my article, some scientific studies have been done on exactly this topic.

Here’s one such experiment, quoted from the original paper on NBER.org:

“…participants receive an email from their boss, and to answer it they must analyze several sources of information. They must write a reply to the email that diagnoses the problem and proposes a solution.”

Sounds pretty familiar, right?

Participants were either given ChatGPT to write their response, or asked to do it unassisted.

“Without AI, higher-education participants outperform lower-education participants by 0.548 standard deviations; with AI, the gap falls to 0.139, closing about three-quarters of the initial difference.”

That means that less educated participants performed nearly as well, thanks to AI! That’s massive!

What does this mean?

It means that people with less education and who are worse at writing get more initial benefit out of AI’s capabilities.

But not so fast:

In another experiment from Kenya:

640 Kenyan entrepreneurs were given an AI business mentor and tracked on real revenue and profit for months.

“Subsample analyses show that low performers did nearly 10% worse because of the AI assistant, whereas high performers may have benefited by over 15%.”

So high-performers still get more out of these tools on balance.

Now that’s a lot of facts and numbers, but what does it all mean?

On its face, you might say that GPT’s help is a massive win for people who lack formal education—for people who aren’t strong writers or problem solvers to begin with. But there’s more nuance here, that my own experience bears out.

While an AI tool will help a low performer write a better email in a one-off test, this result can be deceptive. For that moment or that email, an employee appears to perform much better than their own intellectual capacity. But if you were to call that person on the phone, they wouldn’t know or remember the beautiful email they just sent.

I’ve witnessed this extensively in my own career, now that I receive dozens (hundreds?) of AI-generated emails in serious business situations every single day.

These long-winded AI slop emails still don’t tell me what anyone actually thinks, feels, or truly believes—I just know what AI wrote for them.

So this means as business owners, that we can’t trust a well-crafted email. The best way to know what someone is truly capable of is to call them on the phone. You might be surprised at how completely different it is to simply talk to a person unaided by AI, and how refreshing and honest it feels in comparison to reading their latest GPT soup.