Culture & Alignment · 5 min read
In the age of AI, HI matters more, not less
AI will not replace people. It replaces the people willing to act like AI: agreeable, frictionless, quick to say yes to whatever was just suggested. That is not a compliment to the tool. It is a warning about the habit. An assistant that tells you every idea in the chat is great is optimising for your approval, not your outcome.
Every strategist, planner and creative in the industry now has access to the same AI tools. That levels a playing field that used to reward whoever had the fastest execution. It does not level the field that matters: the thinking underneath.
The evidence that this thinking is quietly eroding is no longer anecdotal. A 2026 IBM Institute for Business Value study of 1,500 CHROs and 8,800 employees found 60% of employees worry AI is eroding their skills, with critical thinking cited most often as the capability in decline, even as 57% of CHROs rank critical thinking among the workforce's most important capabilities. A separate 2025 MIT study found that participants who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly lower brain activity than those who worked unaided, and remembered less of what they had produced afterward. The skill does not vanish because the tool is bad. It vanishes because it stopped being exercised.
A prompt can produce a brief summary, a competitor scan, a draft script. It cannot produce an insight rooted in something a person actually noticed. It cannot sit in a client's regional office and feel the gap between what leadership says and what the floor believes. It cannot walk a souq, a mall, a labour camp, and come back with an observation nobody else in the room had. That work is still entirely human, and it is becoming rarer precisely because it is easier to skip.
The temptation is to hand the thinking over: ask the tool to decipher the brief, generate the territories, shortlist the ideas. Do that enough times and the muscle for original thought quietly disappears. Critical thinking is trained the same way any other skill is, by starting from a blank page under real constraint, not by reviewing what a model already generated. Some organisations have already started building this back in deliberately: BCG has documented companies where junior employees work through a problem alone, framing the question and producing an initial analysis by hand, before touching an AI tool to refine it.
We use AI. We are not precious about the tools. But we treat it as a research assistant and a production accelerant, never as the source of the idea. The brief still gets read by a person. The insight still comes from a conversation, an observation, a piece of culture someone on the team actually lived through. The writing, the scribbling, the arguing in a room, that is where the strategy is actually built.
AI will not replace people. It replaces the people willing to act like AI: agreeable, frictionless, quick to say yes to whatever was just suggested. That is not a compliment to the tool. It is a warning about the habit. An assistant that tells you every idea in the chat is great is optimising for your approval, not your outcome.
Organisations do not need more agreement in the room. They need people who observe sharply, think independently, and are willing to say the uncomfortable thing before the work starts, not after it has failed. A team that nods along to every brief, every comment, every piece of feedback is not being efficient. It is outsourcing its judgement the same way it would outsource a prompt.
We want truth tellers, not people pleasers. The industry needs truth tellers more than ever. The brilliance a brand or an organisation actually needs right now is the willingness to challenge the status quo out loud, in the room, before the deck is built. That is not a skill AI can be prompted into. It has to be hired for, protected, and rewarded, or it disappears from the culture entirely.
Related: AI cannot be your differentiator.
Topics: AI, Human Insight, Creative Process, Strategy