3 Minute Read

No one really wants to say this out loud.

So let’s do this…

AI is making us cognitively lazy.

Not because the technology is flawed but because the way we’re using it is.

Three data points that should make you pause:

Over 70% of professionals are already using AI weekly.
Most won’t admit how often they rely on it to do the thinking.

AI can improve output quality by up to 40%.
What it doesn’t show is whether the person behind it got any better.

Some projections suggest up to 40% of core workplace skills could atrophy in the next decade due to over-reliance on AI.

Individually, they look like progress but together, they tell a different story.

We are not just accelerating work, we are outsourcing thinking.

There’s a quiet trade happening:

You give me your thinking… I’ll give you speed.

And like most good trades, it feels like a win…at first.

There used to be a momen before AI where you are staring at a blank page.

Half-formed ideas with bad sentences and friction in your mind.

That wasn’t inefficiency, that was the work and where growth comes from.

Now the page fills instantly.

It is clean, structured, persuasive and scarily convincing.

And in skipping the struggle, you skip the part where original thought is formed.

You draft something, perhaps a strategy, a point of view.

Then you run it through AI to “sense-check” it.

It feels smart or even the responsible thing to do

But something subtle changes.

You stop asking: Is this right?
And start asking: Does this sound right?

That is the moment judgment begins to erode.

Here’s the reality we are facing:

AI makes average thinking look exceptional.

You wrote the strategy with AI, you then adjusted a few words and uou delivered it confidently.

It landed well and got you the intended results and no one in the room knew the difference….including you.

Most people aren’t using AI to think better.
They’re using it to avoid finding out how good they actually are.

AI doesn’t just remove effort, it removes resistance and resistance is where thinking is built.

No resistance → no depth
No depth → no judgment
No judgment → no leadership

What you’re left with is:

Fast
Fluent
Fragile

This is not an argument against AI.

That would be the easiest position to take.

The harder question is this:

Are you using AI to sharpen your thinking…or to bypass it?

Because the gap between those two paths will not be obvious at first.

But over time, it compounds quietly on a daily basis

One leads to leverage and the other to atrophy.

If the outputs are improving, but the humans behind them aren’t…

What exactly are we optimising for?

Reply here or reach out directly to James Absalom, Chief Commercial Officer - International & Managing Partner of Global Supply Chain Practice, at ZRG.