Reading AI answers
Judge what AI assistants and agents hand back: citations, numbers, formulas, charts, research reports, recaps and agent actions.
Start: Citations and claimsAbout Any AI assistant
Reading AI answers is a skills pack for checking what AI assistants and agents hand back before you repeat it or act on it. It works across tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Gemini. You practice spotting uncited claims, wrong totals, percent mix-ups, broken spreadsheet formulas, misleading charts, thin research reports, wrong meeting recaps and agent runs that didn't finish.
Best for: Anyone who uses AI answers at work and passes them on to others.
Good for
- Checking that each claim has a citation that really supports it
- Catching totals that don't add up, wrong units and percent versus points
- Reading formulas like VLOOKUP and SUMIFS before you trust the result
- Comparing what an agent says it did with what its run log shows
Where people slip
- Trusting a report with five sources that all trace back to one press release
- Reading a maybe in a meeting recap as a decision
- Missing a filter that limits an analysis to one quarter
- Believing an agent's Done! message when a step is still waiting
How do I check if an AI answer is accurate?
Open the citations and confirm each one supports the claim next to it. Check the scope of the data, the units and the totals. For anything that matters, ask the tool to show its work, then check a few numbers yourself.
What is the difference between percent and percentage points?
Going from 4% to 7% is a rise of 3 percentage points. As a percent change, it's a 75% increase. AI answers sometimes mix the two, so check which one a claim means.
Why can VLOOKUP return the wrong value?
If you leave out the last argument, VLOOKUP uses approximate match. On unsorted data that can return the wrong row with no error. Set the last argument to FALSE for an exact match.
Can I trust an agent when it says a task is done?
Check the run log first. An agent can finish some steps and stop on others, like a failed sign-in or a send that's waiting for approval. Compare what it says it did with what actually changed.
Checked against Any AI assistant's own docs on 2026-11-06.
Check claims, scope and runs
Trace claims to sources, read an analysis's scope, and review an agent's run log.
0 of 3 lessons completeCheck numbers, charts and formulas
Catch wrong totals, mixed-up percentages, misleading axes and risky spreadsheet formulas before they spread.
0 of 2 lessons complete