I’m getting tired of watching smart people get dumber as they let AI do their thinking.
Research? Automated. Writing? Generated. Strategy? Summarized from a hundred sources you never have to read.
It sounds like a superpower. It feels like one, too, for about five minutes.
Then you look at what came out the other side and realize it could have been written by anyone. Because it was written by no one.
The temptation
The promise of AI tools is speed. And speed is real. I use AI every day to move faster on things that used to take hours.
But there’s a specific kind of speed that’s a trap.
It’s the speed you get when you skip the thinking. When you hand over the part of the work where you were supposed to develop judgment, and let the machine fill in the blank instead.
This looks productive. Your output goes up. Your calendar clears. You feel like you’re ahead.
You’re not.
You’re outsourcing the one thing that makes your work yours.
Where I first saw the line
I run a business course called 30x500 with my partner Amy Hoy. One of the core skills we teach is Sales Safari - a research method where you read real conversations from your target audience (forums, communities, reviews, social media), take notes on what people actually say, and start spotting patterns in their pain, language, and behavior.
It’s unglamorous work. You sit there. You read. You take notes by hand. You don’t know what you’re looking for until you start finding it.
Students always want to skip it.
“Can’t I just use AI to summarize the forums?”
“What if I have it pull out the pain points for me?”
“Can’t I feed it all the posts and get a report?”
You can. And if you do, you’ll end up with a report that sounds right but teaches you nothing.
The whole point of Sales Safari is that you develop the eye. You start noticing what other people miss. You build a mental model of your audience that no summary can replace, because the understanding lives in the act of reading, not in the output.
The same logic applies to any skill built on judgment - consulting, design, investing, hiring, product strategy. The hard part isn’t getting information. The hard part is knowing what it means.
Discovery can be assisted. Understanding cannot be outsourced.
On one side: AI helps you think better. It holds context while you make decisions. It suggests angles you hadn’t considered. It gives you a sparring partner who never gets tired.
On the other side: AI thinks for you. It generates the insights. It decides what matters. It fills in the parts where your brain was supposed to do the work.
The first side makes you sharper. The second side makes you replaceable.
And here’s the part that should worry you: the second side feels easier. That’s the whole problem.
What “thinking partner” actually looks like
I use AI constantly. Here’s what it looks like:
Beating the blank page. I’ve done the research. I have notes. I know what I want to say. But I can’t get started. So I talk it through with AI, and it helps me find the thread. The insight is mine. The momentum is shared.
Expanding what I already found. I’ve been reading forums for weeks. I have a list of themes. I ask AI: “What adjacent topics might I be missing?” It suggests three new angles. Two are dead ends. One opens up a vein I hadn’t considered. But I still have to go read those conversations myself.
Finding new places to look. I know my audience hangs out in certain communities. AI helps me find five more I didn’t know about. I still have to show up, read, and do the work of understanding.
Clustering my own notes. I have 200 observations. AI proposes three ways to group them. I look at each one and realize two are surface-level and one reveals something I’d been circling for weeks. AI suggested the lens. I decided what was real.
Getting interviewed. This is the most underrated one. I ask AI to interview me about my own ideas. It asks questions I wouldn’t have thought to ask myself. The act of answering forces clarity I wouldn’t have reached alone.
In every case, I did the thinking. AI held the context, suggested options, and helped me move faster through the parts where speed doesn’t cost me anything.
What “replacement for thinking” looks like
You feed AI a bunch of forum posts and ask it to identify pain points. You get a clean bulleted list. You never read the original conversations. You build a product based on the summary.
You ask AI to research your competitors and generate a positioning strategy. It produces something plausible. You ship it without ever talking to a customer.
You use AI to write your marketing copy from scratch - no original research, no real audience understanding, just “write me a landing page for people who struggle with X.”
The output looks professional. It reads well. It says nothing that’s wrong.
It also says nothing that’s yours.
And here’s the kicker: anything that’s easy for you to automate is easy for everyone else to automate, too.
When everyone’s using AI to generate the same summaries from the same data, you end up in a race to the bottom. The work converges. The insights flatten. Your “competitive advantage” is now a commodity.
The counterintuitive truth
The skills most tempting to automate are the ones most worth protecting.
Reading forums is tedious. Taking notes is slow. Sitting with ambiguity while you wait for patterns to emerge is uncomfortable.
That’s the work.
That’s where your judgment gets built. That’s where you develop the instinct that lets you look at a market and see what everyone else misses.
AI can make that process faster around the edges. It can help you organize, expand, explore, and articulate what you’ve learned.
But it cannot learn for you.
The moment you let it skip the uncomfortable part - the reading, the noticing, the sitting with “I don’t know yet” - you’ve traded your sharpest tool for a shortcut that makes you duller.
The principle
Every time you’re about to hand something to AI, ask one question:
Am I using this to think better, or to avoid thinking?
If the answer is “think better” - go.
If the answer is “avoid thinking” - stop.
The difference between these two paths compounds over time.
One makes you someone with sharper instincts, better pattern recognition, and a perspective no one else has. The other makes you someone who produces a lot of output that sounds like everyone else’s.
AI is the best thinking partner most of us have ever had.
Don’t waste it by asking it to think for you.