17/02/2026
𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐖𝐞 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐬 — 𝐨𝐫 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐃𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐄𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐲𝐞𝐞𝐬?
Every manager I work with says the same two things in the same breath:
"AI is non-negotiable for our future success."
And:
"I'm genuinely worried about what it's doing to my team's ability to think."
Both. At. The. Same. Time.
That tension isn't a contradiction — it's the defining leadership challenge of this decade.
What's your organization doing about it?
A recent MIT Media Lab study set out to measure exactly this. Using EEG to track brain activity, researchers found that participants who relied on LLMs showed weaker neural connectivity over time — and that this effect persisted even after the AI was removed.
Be careful! It's a preprint. Not yet peer-reviewed.
The sample size is small.
But here's what matters:
The researchers felt the signal was strong enough to publish early and force a conversation.
And that conversation is long overdue.
The managers I sit with aren't naive. They see this. They feel it.
They are 100% convinced that AI is an essential tool for future success. And simultaneously have no idea how to prevent it from quietly eroding the human capabilities that make their organizations worth anything in the first place.
That gap, between knowing the risk and knowing what to do about it, is where companies are most exposed right now.
The brain works like a muscle.
Skills not practiced are skills lost, and this happens fastest with the complex, high-level cognitive tasks that drive real competitive advantage.
The "out-of-the-loop" effect is well-documented: automation erodes exactly the judgment you need most when things go wrong.
The organizations that will win aren't those with the most AI.
They're the ones who figure out how to use AI without hollowing out the humans behind it.
AI Champions play a vital role in this process (https://vist.ly/4rtyb).
That means deliberately structuring when and how AI enters a workflow.
While not assuming that efficiency gains today won't come at a cognitive cost tomorrow.
We don't yet have a full playbook for this.
But "we don't have all the answers" is not an excuse for not asking the question.
Are you asking it?
Inspired by Prof. Andreas Moring's piece on cognitive deskilling: humanresourcesmanager.de and the MIT Media Lab study (preprint): brainonllm.com