Two posts on my LinkedIn feed last week got me thinking. First, Sir Cary Cooper arguing that AI won’t replace you, but someone who knows how to use it might. Fair point. Leadership matters; capability building matters. All true. Then Sharon O’Dea asking the uncomfortable question nobody wants to touch: what if we’re promoting tools that actively erode the thinking capacity we’re supposed to be developing?

Put those two together and you get something more troubling than either post alone.

This is the pattern I keep seeing. Someone senior says, “we need to do something about AI.” L&D hears “we need an AI course.” Within weeks there’s content about prompt engineering, comms about productivity gains, and encouragement to embed AI into everything. Six months later, nothing meaningful has changed. AI tools sit unused or misused. Performance hasn’t shifted, but everyone’s been on the course, so box ticked.

For decades, L&D has remained trapped in this training loop. AI just makes it more visible. What Sharon’s post highlights that Cooper misses: 91% of CIOs admit their organisations are ignoring what AI actually does to how people think (Gartner). The early signs are already there: outputs look polished, but reasoning is thinner; editing replaces original thinking; and content volume rises while clarity doesn’t. Research from SBS Swiss Business School shows frequent AI use correlates strongly with weaker critical thinking skills. Not because people can’t think, but because the system no longer expects them to.

Most organisations haven’t clearly defined what the performance problem is that AI is meant to solve. “We need to be AI-ready” isn’t a strategy. So we default to “use AI for everything”, which systematically removes the cognitive load that builds diagnostic thinking. If every first draft comes from AI, when do people learn to structure arguments? If every analysis is automated, when do they develop pattern recognition? Cooper’s research shows 64% believe AI will increase their performance. Belief isn’t capability. And capability isn’t just knowing how to use the tool. It’s retaining the cognitive capacity to know when NOT to use it.

What I think ACTUALLY needs to happen is a step shift. L&D functions are trapped producing courses in response to perceived demand. The AI challenge makes this dysfunction impossible to ignore because we’re promoting cognitive offloading without any framework for preserving the thinking that makes us valuable.

If you’re serious about AI capability building, the starting question isn’t “what skills do people need?” It’s “what thinking do we need to protect, and how do we design systems that preserve rather than erode it?” That’s not a training question. It’s a strategic question about what capability actually MEANS, when the tools can do the surface work but can’t do the judgement.

Many L&D functions aren’t equipped to answer it because they’ve spent decades being rewarded for producing courses rather than diagnosing what performance actually needs to change.

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#LearningAndDevelopment #CriticalThinking #StrategicLearning