AI can tank teams' critical thinking skills. Here's how to protect yours

"AI is transforming how teams work. But it's not just the tools that matter. It's what happens to thinking when those tools do the heavy lifting, and whether managers notice before the gap widens. Across industries, there's a common pattern. AI-supported work looks polished. The reports are clean. The analyses are structured. But when someone asks the team to defend a decision, not summarize one, the room goes quiet. The output is there, but the reasoning isn't owned."

"Through our work advising teams navigating AI adoption, Jenny as an executive coach, learning and development designer, and Noam as an AI strategist, we have seen a clear distinction: there are teams where AI flattens performance, and teams where it deepens it. The difference isn't whether AI is allowed. It's whether judgment is designed back into the work. In good news, teams can adopt practices to shift from producing answers to owning decisions."

AI often produces fluent, authoritative-seeming outputs that encourage uncritical acceptance and can erode team ownership of reasoning. Unchecked AI summaries can propagate incorrect facts across teams, as when multiple groups repeated a wrong regulatory statistic drawn from an AI blend of outdated and draft guidance. The key determinant of whether AI flattens or deepens performance is whether work intentionally reintegrates human judgment. Implementing practices that treat AI output as unverified input and require deliberate checks and decision ownership restores critical thinking without slowing productive work.

Read at Fast Company