Treat AI as a sparring partner, not an oracle

When complexity spirals and pressure mounts, AI’s promise of rapid clarity can be irresistible. However, the danger isn’t that AI makes mistakes, but that it makes them confidently, disarming your own critical thinking.

I call this ‘artificial ignorance’, trusting AI outputs without critical reasoning until your thinking skills atrophy from disuse. What initially seems like help quickly turns into dependency. Once leaders start trusting expedient answers over sound judgement, small errors scale from private missteps, or worse, compound to public failures.

In July 2025, Deloitte Australia refunded their consulting fee after delivering a government report with AI-fabricated citations. Air Canada’s chatbot gave incorrect bereavement fare information.

Both shared a pattern where leaders asked AI to deliver answers rather than challenge assumptions, optimising for speed over judgement.

Whilst AI might deliver short-term answers that feel accurate, the truth, as we’ve already seen, can prove very different. As Daniel Kahneman warned in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, “When there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate toward the least demanding course of action.”

That’s exactly the trap AI creates. Its ease invites complacency, and when speed feels effortless, critical thinking quietly fades. The challenge for leaders isn’t to resist AI’s acceleration, but to use it as a mirror to reveal whether it’s sharpening our judgement or quietly making us irrelevant.

The cost of getting this wrong

When people outsource thinking, they don’t get that capability back.

Opportunities are missed, models are optimised for wrong outcomes, customers leave and relationships are broken, whilst employees lose motivation and growth opportunities.

Organisations rarely consider this robustly. Small decisions that individually seem reasonable collectively amount to high costs. This is why I’m opposing companies that primarily chase efficiency gains, because they miss the real power of both AI and their people. Used correctly, AI can widen our perspective, expand considerations and be prompted to question assumptions that reveal blind spots.

Capturing this value requires deliberate practice, and many leaders do not invest the effort, preferring to optimise for faster answers.

From assistant to sparring partner

Using AI as a digital assistant is easy and now commonplace. The benefits are clear for automating meeting minutes, summarising text and so on. Still, the shift to sparring partner demands a different mindset, one of curiosity versus control, questions versus conclusions.