Is AI Making Us Dumber?

Every day I am amazed at the power of AI. The speed. The volume it can handle. The accuracy. The reliability of the automations it runs while I sleep. And with every release, it gets better, faster, sharper. They are, without exaggeration, one of the most remarkable tools I have worked with in my career.

But I am concerned that AI is making us dumber.

Let me explain.

One of my standard recommendations for a Fractional Executive launching a practice is simple: LEARN.

With your experience you are a phenomenal subject matter expert, but you don’t know how to build a successful business around yourself.

Join communities for peer-to-peer learning. Take a training course to understand what it actually takes to build and sustain a practice. Find mentors who have walked the path. Read, listen, and surround yourself with people who will challenge your assumptions. Building a successful practice is not just about delivering great work for clients; it is about running a business, and that is a discipline all its own.

More recently, though, I hear something different. Executives tell me they have gotten all the answers from their AI engine. Pricing models, positioning, contracts, outreach strategy, it is all there. No need to join a community. No need to take a course. No need to learn. Just ask Claude or ChatGPT.

And I understand the appeal. The answers are fast, articulate, and confident. Why spend months learning what you can retrieve in seconds?

Here is the problem: you don't know what you don't know.

AI is extraordinary at answering the questions you think to ask. But it cannot surface the blind spot you don't know exists. It won't warn you about the risk you never considered, the market shift you can't see coming, or the mistake you're about to repeat because you didn't know others had made it first. You can't ask for a blind spot. And a confident answer to the wrong question is worse than no answer at all, because it feels like knowledge.

When you outsource your learning entirely to AI, you are putting the success of your practice in the hands of a platform, and in the boundaries of your own questions.

So, use AI. Use it aggressively. Let it accelerate your thinking and handle the volume. But don't let it replace the hard, humbling work of actually learning your craft. The goal is not to have all the answers. It is to become the kind of practitioner who knows which questions to ask. And, as a result, is successful.