2 AI Habits That Weaken Your Critical Thinking
Story By Staff Reporter
Your employer probably wants you to use AI, but it may not be warning you that heavy use can erode your thinking skills.
David Martin, global lead of people and organization at Boston Consulting Group, told Business Insider that workers face a real danger of deskilling so far that they become unemployable.
Leaders are already noticing. In a June BCG survey of more than 70 C-suite executives worldwide, half said critical skills are declining inside their organizations. The skills slipping fastest are those leaders consider most important for long-term success: framing problems, exercising judgment, thinking creatively, and evaluating solutions.
Yet few companies are acting. Only about 10% have a specific plan to tackle deskilling, and roughly a third haven’t even raised the topic.
So the responsibility falls on individuals to guard their own abilities. Martin, who is also a managing director and senior partner at BCG, named two habits that can undermine critical thinking, along with ways to push back.
1. Leaning on the AI summary
If basic follow-up questions leave you stuck, you may be depending on AI too much.
Martin said it’s easy to tell when someone had AI summarize a slide deck they were meant to read themselves: they can’t go deeper or answer questions beyond the summary. Their knowledge, he said, goes only as far as what the AI told them.
The best employees, he noted, still interrogate the material on their own, even after receiving an AI-generated overview.
2. Handing core work to AI
Leaders increasingly prize judgment and taste, so it’s risky to outsource work that demands strategy and expertise. Martin said he can see skills fading in people who use AI for more than routine chores like drafting emails, and who also lean on it for the substance of their work.
He doesn’t advise against using AI for core tasks. His caution is against accepting its output without scrutiny. He suggests acting as the opponent: ask the questions you or your colleagues might raise, assume the output may be flawed or misleading, and argue the opposing side. In essence, build a red team against whatever the AI produces.
Put yourself to the test
To fight cognitive decay, Martin recommends stepping away from AI for one week each quarter. The point is to show yourself you can still do your job as well as or better than usual without relying on it.
Because AI promises large productivity gains, companies have good reason to balance automated work with work done without it, Martin said. Over-reliance carries risk, and a deliberate break can help.
