Assistant Professor
Rethink How You Decide with AI
What You'll Learn
- Develop decision-making strategies with AI that highlight both the visible and invisible choices.
- Create prompts to allocate time, money, and energy more effectively across priorities.
- Build a personal decision-making system using AI that adjusts to your life as it changes.
- Use AI to explore ideas, challenge your reasoning, and recognize limitations.
3 Modules
3 Hours
1 hr per module (approx.)
About Rethink How You Decide with AI
The right questions make AI a valuable tool for decision-making. “Rethink How You Decide with AI” teaches you how to use AI as a thought partner, allowing you to make more intentional, informed decisions.
Through guided activities, reflection, and hands-on AI exploration, you'll examine the habits, assumptions, and patterns that shape your choices. You'll identify the constraints and tradeoffs behind real decisions, compare different approaches to setting priorities, and practice using AI to generate perspectives, challenge assumptions, and uncover blind spots.
Your goal isn’t finding the "perfect answer," it’s developing a flexible decision-making process that evolves with you. Along the way, you'll learn how to use generative AI to stress-test ideas, evaluate alternatives, and strengthen your reasoning while maintaining ownership of your decisions.
By the end of this course, you’ll have a personalized system that supports your decision-making, allowing you to move forward with your ideas with great clarity, confidence, and intention.
This is the third course in the Applied AI: Data Analysis, Workflows, and Decisions series, a three-course series on practical ways to integrate AI into your personal and professional routines.
Skills You'll Gain
- Critical Thinking
- Data Literacy
- Data Validation
- Decision Making
- Problem Solving
- Strategic Thinking
- Systems Thinking
What You'll Earn
- Certificate of Completion
- Certificates of completion acknowledge knowledge acquired upon completion of a non-credit course or program.
Welcome Message
Welcome to Rethink How You Decide with AI! This course teaches you how to use AI as a thought partner, allowing you to make more intentional, informed decisions.
Through guided activities, reflection, and hands-on AI exploration, you'll examine the habits, assumptions, and patterns that shape your choices. By the end of this course, you'll have a personalized system that supports your decision-making, allowing you to move forward with your ideas with greater clarity, confidence, and intention.
This abbreviated syllabus description was created with the help of AI tools and reviewed by staff. The full syllabus is available to those who enroll in the course.
Course Schedule
Module One: Seeing Clearly
- Identify the full range of decisions made in a chosen domain, including habitual, embedded, and default choices.
- Distinguish between a single choice and a strategy: a framework that pre-structures how choices get made over time.
- Map both choice points and working constraints in a specific life domain.
- Use GenAI to surface decision patterns, blind spots, and unexamined assumptions.
Module Two: Thinking Well
- Construct multiple configurations of options within a chosen domain given choice points and constraints.
- Evaluate configurations using payoff structures (gradient, threshold, plateau) as lenses for reasoning about trade-offs, not bins for classifying decisions.
- Use GenAI to expand the configuration space and stress-test a preferred configuration, while recognizing sycophancy, missing context, and overconfident tone.
- Assess advice from any source (AI, mentor, peer) by identifying what context the advisor is missing.
Module Three: Update as You Learn
- Distinguish between making a single good decision and building a system that produces coherent decisions over time, and explain why the latter requires deliberate maintenance.
- Diagnose what decision-making breakdowns reveal: overcommitted structurally, carrying too many active decisions, or drifting because triggers aren't working.
- Design a personal decision-making rhythm that matches one’s actual energy and temperament.
- Revise a north star document using GenAI as a calibration partner and articulate what has changed in thinking.
Grading Policy
There are three quizzes in this course, each worth 33.33% of your final grade. You must earn an overall grade of 80% in order to pass the course and earn the certificate.
Course content developed by U-M faculty and managed by the university. Faculty titles and affiliations are updated periodically.
Beginner Level
Basic familiarity with computers and internet search is recommended.
