Is AI Making Your Employees Worse At Thinking?

Recorded live at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, this conversation puts David Rice and Dr. Lilian Ajayi Ore—AI lead faculty and lecturer in strategic communication at Columbia University and co-author of The Power of the Learning Mindset—in the middle of one of the biggest questions surrounding workplace AI: Are companies gaining efficiency while quietly weakening their people’s ability to think? With the energy of a live conference comes some background noise, but the discussion cuts through it. David and Dr. Ore explore cognitive debt, skill decay, and why the usual AI metrics—seats, logins, prompts, adoption rates—say very little about whether workforce capability is actually improving. They discuss the risks of outsourcing judgment and critical thinking, the loss of institutional knowledge when organizations replace people rather than reskill them, and why AI transformation needs to be treated as a talent priority alongside a technology priority. Because faster work isn’t much of a win if the people doing it are slowly losing the skills that made them valuable in the first place. What You’ll Learn: Why AI adoption can create cognitive overload even while promising greater efficiency. How outsourcing reasoning and decision-making to AI can contribute to skill decay. Why organizations need to treat AI transformation as a talent challenge, not simply a technology rollout. How learning prowess differs from chasing mastery based on how everyone else uses AI. Why reskilling and upskilling should happen alongside technology deployment rather than after jobs disappear. Which workforce measures can give leaders a clearer picture of whether organizational capability is actually rising. Key Takeaways: Protect the thinking, not just the output. AI can shorten a process, but that doesn’t mean it should own the reasoning behind it. Dr. Ore’s approach is to keep humans responsible for judgment, strategy, and critical thinking while using AI as a tool—not letting the tool dictate how the mind works. Stop confusing adoption with capability. Seats, logins, prompts, velocity, and ROI can tell you whether people are using AI. They can’t tell you whether those people are becoming better at their jobs. Leaders also need to examine cognitive stress, wellbeing, and whether new skills are developing alongside new technology. Technology deployment and talent development should move together. Introducing new technology while releasing the people whose roles it affects risks throwing away institutional knowledge along with the job description. Dr. Ore argues organizations have a responsibility to reskill and upskill employees as their technology changes. Create a “prowess map.” Instead of copying how colleagues or competitors use the latest shiny tool, employees should identify their own learning gaps, determine where AI genuinely helps, and know when they need peers, training, networks, or other resources to keep developing. Keep entry- and mid-level pathways alive. Entry-level employees are potential future leaders and innovators, while mid-level employees already carry valuable organizational knowledge. Eliminating those layers without creating opportunities for development risks weakening the talent pipeline from both directions. Chapters: 00:00 — The Hidden Cost of AI 01:53 — AI and the Learning Mindset 04:54 — Building Learning Prowess 06:51 — Mapping Your Learning 09:31 — AI and Skill Decay 11:23 — Reskilling Before Replacing 13:45 — Who Owns Cognitive Debt? 16:02 — The Talent Revolution 17:58 — Protecting the Talent Pipeline 19:15 — Let Humans Think First 21:35 — Measuring AI’s Real Impact Meet Our Guest: Dr. Lilian Ajayi Ore is AI Lead Faculty and a Lecturer in Strategic Communication at Columbia University, where she teaches at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital communication, analytics, and strategy. An award-winning executive coach, chief learning officer, marketing executive, research scholar, and data scientist, she brings more than 17 years of experience working with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 organizations, including IBM, Panasonic, Comcast NBCUniversal, and Citibank. She is also the Founder and CEO of the Global Connections for Women Foundation and co-author, with Marshall Goldsmith, of The Power of the Learning Mindset. Her work focuses on AI, leadership development, digital transformation, and helping organizations and professionals build the skills needed to thrive in a rapidly changing workplace. Related Links: Join the People Managing People Community https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/free... Connect with Lilian on LinkedIn   / lilianore   Check out Lilian’s book — The Power of the Learning Mindset https://www.amazon.in/Power-Learning-...