The AI Thinking Model is a proprietary framework developed by Liz B. Baker for developing five human cognitive capacities — Critical Thinking, Wisdom, Innovation, Strategy, and Ethics — through configured AI and strategic practice, resulting in transformation.
The AI Thinking Model was created by Liz B. Baker, founder of the Global Institute for AI and Humanity. The framework emerged from two decades of Fortune 500 leadership, executive coaching, and direct observation of how professionals, students, and organizations interact with generative AI.
The framework is grounded in the Abrami et al. (2015) meta-analysis published in the Review of Educational Research, which analyzed 341 studies and over 20,000 participants to identify the conditions necessary for critical thinking development. The AI Thinking Model maps precisely to those five conditions. Baker developed the framework independently before encountering the Abrami research; the alignment between the two serves as empirical validation of the model's architecture.
Additional research supporting the framework comes from Harvard, Wharton, Boston Consulting Group, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, documenting both the cognitive risks of unconfigured AI use and the measurable benefits of structured engagement.
Stop prompting AI. Configure it to develop you.
The AI Thinking Model operates through three phases. Configure: set up your AI strategically around the five capacities. Think Well: bring real problems to your configured AI, push back on its responses, test your reasoning, and refine your conclusions through conversation. Transform: do this regularly, and the questions AI asks you become questions you ask yourself. The pushback you receive becomes pushback you give. The capacities you develop become yours, available in any room, including ones where AI isn't.
The variable is how you configure and engage with AI.
The AI Thinking Model organizes human development around five capacities. Each is a dimension of thinking that strengthens with daily practice and atrophies without it. These are the areas where AI has the greatest potential to sharpen human capability, and the five most likely to weaken if we let the machine do the heavy lifting for us.
The foundation. Questioning assumptions, evaluating evidence, identifying logical gaps, surfacing counterarguments, and finding flaws in your own reasoning. The discipline runs in both directions: you challenge AI, and AI challenges you. Over time, questioning becomes reflexive. The practice becomes who you are.
The capacity that turns knowledge into judgment before the stakes become expensive. Considering long-term consequences, balancing competing priorities, thinking beyond self-interest, and choosing the hard conversation over the easy yes. Wisdom is uniquely hard to develop because its results unfold over years. Configured AI coaches toward depth over speed.
A capacity, not a personality trait. Cross-domain thinking, creative range, and the discipline of pulling solutions from one field into another where they haven't been tried. Configure AI for innovation, and over time, you cross more boundaries on your own. Pattern recognition becomes instinctive.
Prioritizing ruthlessly, anticipating obstacles, thinking systemically, and asking whether you're executing on the right things before you execute faster. Strategy goes beyond "What should I do today?" to "Given everything I know, everything I value, and the limits of time and capacity, what's the highest and best use of what I have?"
Becoming someone whose behavior, under pressure, reflects values that honor human dignity, truth, and the good of others. Configured AI serves as an ethical mirror: it asks whether your decisions align with who you said you want to be. AI doesn't become wise or ethical. It can't. But you can.
The AI Thinking Model Configuration Wizard at aithinkingmodel.com guides users through a series of decisions about who they are, what they need, and what kind of thinking partner will serve them best. The output is a custom configuration that the user pastes into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot. The configuration works on free tiers of all four platforms.
Thinking well is the practice of using your configured AI to do real cognitive work. Bring it actual problems. Push back on its responses. Test your reasoning. Refine your conclusions through conversation. The AI doesn't think for you. It thinks with you, and the discipline runs in both directions.
This is where critical thinking is reclaimed. In each conversation. In the discipline of refusing to let AI do your thinking for you. The book The AI Thinking Model: Reclaiming Critical Thinking in the Age of Artificial Intelligence provides the strategies: how to challenge AI, when to override it, how to catch its errors, and how to use the friction between human judgment and AI output as a development practice.
Transformation is what happens when you do this regularly. The questions AI asks you become questions you ask yourself. The pushback you receive becomes pushback you give. The capacities you develop become yours, available in any room, including ones where AI isn't.
The five capacities are muscles. They strengthen with use. AI is the training partner who shows up every day, who doesn't get tired, who doesn't skip the capacity you'd rather avoid. Over time, the capacities stop being something your AI coaches you on and start being something you carry on your own. That's the entire promise of the framework: what begins as configured AI becomes who you are.
The AI Thinking Model applies to any person or organization using generative AI. The framework includes role-specific configurations for executives, managers, entrepreneurs, educators, students, parents, caregivers, faith leaders, career changers, neurodivergent thinkers, public servants, and nonprofit leaders, among others.
Enterprise organizations deploy the framework across teams using customized configurations aligned to organizational values and strategic priorities.
The AI Thinking Model works with any generative AI platform that supports custom instructions or system prompts, including ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Copilot (Microsoft). The framework is platform-agnostic by design. It is not affiliated with any AI company.
The AI Thinking Model: Reclaiming Critical Thinking in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Liz B. Baker was published in May 2026 by the Global Institute for AI and Humanity. ISBN: 979-8-9959765-0-9. Available on Amazon.
The AI Thinking Model™, the AI Thinking Model Configuration Wizard™, and Double Your Team in One Day™ are trademarks of Liz Barrett Baker, LLC. No part of the framework, its configurations, or its output methodology may be reproduced, distributed, or used to create derivative works without written permission.
The configuration wizard walks you through the process. The book gives you the strategies to think with it.
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