New Book “Stake Skills” Teaches Workers to Document and Stand Behind AI-Assisted Work

Learning scientist Rich Carr’s “Stake Skills” argues the answer to the AI authorship crisis is records workers keep, not referees they fear. Its log is public.

SEATTLE, WA, UNITED STATES, September 5, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Learning scientist Rich Carr has released “Stake Skills: Owning the Work AI Does for You” (Brain-centric, LLC), a handbook that teaches working professionals to document, verify, and take accountability for work produced with artificial intelligence. The book is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions, with an audiobook release to follow.

The book arrives amid ongoing public discussion of AI authorship. Recent national coverage has examined the reliability of AI detection software, and a KPMG and University of Melbourne survey of 48,000 workers across 47 countries found that 57 percent conceal their AI use at work. Research firm Gartner has predicted that by 2027, 75 percent of hiring processes will include testing for AI proficiency, and that through 2026, half of global organizations will adopt assessments of skills performed without AI assistance.

“Workers are about to be evaluated from both sides: prove you can command the machine, and prove you still exist without it,” Carr said. “A detection score can’t answer either question. A kept record answers both.”

“Stake Skills” proposes a third category of professional skill alongside hard skills and soft skills, built on three meanings of the word stake: what a worker risks, what a worker claims, and what a worker vouches for. The book’s central practice is a weekly ten-minute log recording what was produced, what AI drafted, what the author verified or discarded, and which decisions were human. The 157-page handbook includes self-assessment instruments, a foreword by Daria Cupareanu, founder of Amplifiers, and praise by Dr Sam Illingworth, author of the international best-selling, Slow AI.

The book documents its own production. “Stake Skills” was drafted with AI and verified by its author, an account published in full in its sixteenth chapter, and the production log for the book and Carr’s ongoing published work is publicly available at stakeskills.com/staked. Carr will review the log in a live broadcast on his Substack publication, Brain-centric, on Saturday, September 5 at 9 a.m. Pacific, and sign the book’s launch-day entry during the broadcast.

“AI can produce the work. It cannot answer for it,” Carr said. “The record is the thing you keep before anyone asks. It’s learnable in about ninety minutes of reading, and it changes how a person walks into Monday.”

The book’s opening chapter, “A Warning, Instead of a Preface,” is available to read at no cost at stakeskills.com/warning.

Carr is a learning scientist and founder of Brain-centric, LLC, whose Brain-centric Design methodology has been used in training programs for Fortune 100 organizations. He is the author of the previous books “SURPRISED” and “Invisible Influence” and publishes weekly at braincentric.substack.com.
“Stake Skills: Owning the Work AI Does for You” is available on Amazon. Kindle $4.99, paperback $9.99. ISBN 979-8-9996841-3-4 (paperback), 979-8-9996841-4-1 (ebook). More information at stakeskills.com.

Rich Carr
Brain-centric, LLC
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