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Adrian Dunkley Frameworks

The 4Ds of AI Fluency

Use the 4Ds to choose what to delegate to AI, brief it clearly, check the result and take responsibility for what you share.

Practice guide by Adrian Dunkley

Four skills for one task

Start with a task you can check against a source.

1. Delegation

Choose which work to assign to AI and which decisions a person keeps. List the information the AI may use and the action it may take. If the tool can send, publish or change records, decide whether the task needs any of those permissions.

Example. Let the AI draft meeting notes from an approved record. Keep the decision about who owns each action and who receives the notes with the meeting lead.

2. Description

Give the goal, audience, permitted source and format. Explain what to do when a fact is missing. If you will check the output against the source, ask the AI to identify the passage that supports each material claim.

Draft an action list for the people who attended. Use the approved meeting notes only. Separate confirmed actions, requests that still need an owner or date, and proposals. Cite the source line for each item. Mark missing owners or dates as “to confirm”.

3. Discernment

Check claims against the record, including dates and the words people used to approve a decision. If you find an error, fix the draft and decide whether the brief needs to change.

Example. The draft says “The team approved the budget”. The record says “The team will review the budget next week”. Change the draft to reflect a pending review.

4. Diligence

Check that the approved tool and inputs meet the rules for the task. Decide what the recipients need to know about the use of AI. Have the person responsible approve the corrected notes and confirm who may receive them before sharing.

Example. The meeting lead checks the corrected budget item, confirms the recipient list and keeps the approved version with the meeting record.

Try it with a meeting record

Use this short practice record.

  1. Riley will confirm the supplier’s date by Thursday.
  2. The team discussed moving the release to Friday.
  3. The chair asked for a revised schedule and did not assign an owner or due date.

Use the brief above to produce a draft, then compare it with the expected result.

  • Line 1 records Riley’s action to confirm the supplier’s date by Thursday.
  • Line 2 records a proposal to move the release to Friday.
  • Line 3 records an open request for a revised schedule. Its owner and due date are “to confirm”.

Give the draft one point for each item it states accurately and cites the correct line number. If it scores below three, amend the brief to address the error and repeat the exercise. Keep both drafts so you can see whether the change helped.

Source

The AI Fluency Framework was developed by Rick Dakan and Joseph Feller with Anthropic. Adrian Dunkley’s guide applies it to a workplace task. Read the original AI Fluency Framework.