The Death of Deep Thinking

By Nick Gray | IGU Global

Let’s be honest for a second, no wait, better yet let me ask you a question. When was the last time you really struggled to learn something new? Not scrolled, not summarised, but really wrestled with it and until it finally clicked.

A big part of learning comes from friction, sometimes lots and other times not so much but real learning all comes with some level of it when we need to understand something new. What's often happening now when we are needing to understand or learn something new is outsourcing it basically and it's costing you. The reason we do it is simple: our new tools are built to remove friction and I completely understand why we are learning into this new way of life. It's always way easier, more efficient we get to the outcome or answer without any messy process.

Artificial intelligence has basically promised to make us smarter, faster, and more efficient, and in many ways it certainly has. However, for many leaders, brands, and teams, it’s also doing the complete opposite. You may not realise it but it’s actually not making us “dumber” in the literal sense and it’s simply because it makes us less involved in our own intelligence. 

And that is so dangerous.

The Hidden Design Problem

Probably don’t need to say that AI isn’t neutral. But if you didn't know it's engineered for completion, not contemplation. It gives us answers without effort, coherence without conflict, certainty without curiosity. The interface itself is like a blank box, one click, instant output is a design of ease. Amazing right and who doesn't feel good when it's easy. Daniel Kahneman called this cognitive ease: the smoother something feels, the more likely we are to believe it’s true. This is the truth in many cases in our lives, the easier something is to understand the quicker we believe it to be true.

So when very prompt you type, every seamless paragraph that appears, it rewards the brain with a dopamine hit of completion. 

The loop is perfect: 

Question → Instant Clarity → Chemical Satisfaction. 

But the price of that fluency is depth. What AI removes is the friction that once forced us to think. And friction is where intelligence, memory and expertise is made.

How We Actually Learn

To understand why this matters, we need to remember how learning really happens, not in theory, but biologically.

When we learn something new there are three basic steps or stages that we go through:

1. Input – This is when we are receiving new information.

2. Processing – This is the effort we go through to compare, connect it, evaluate it, and build mental structure around it so it makes sense.

3. Output – Anchoring it to memory, knowing it as a schema with the ability to explain or applying what you now understand.

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That middle stage “the processing”  that's where intelligence is built. It’s slow. It’s frustrating. It’s where you wrestle with ideas until they finally stick.

This is also the stage where your brain physically changes. When you engage deeply with something, when you struggle, recall, and refine, the neurons that fire together begin to wire together. To make those pathways faster and more efficient, your brain wraps them in a substance called myelin.

(The more myelin you build, the quicker and cleaner your thoughts travel, like adding insulation around an electrical wire. Every bit of effort, every repetition, strengthens that circuit.)

That’s how expertise is formed, it doesn’t come from exposure, but from the repetition under strain. Like lifting a new weight at the gym. Heavy at first but in time it only gets lighter and easier. So when AI removes that strain, it removes the stimulus for growth. 

You still get the information, but what you don't get or build is the wiring that makes it yours.

Neuroscientist Robert Bjork calls this desirable difficulty, it's the productive struggle that turns information into understanding. It feels slow. It feels inefficient. But that’s exactly what makes it powerful.

When AI steps in too early, it skips that whole stage and creates a cognitive bypass taking you straight from input to output or question to answer. This instantly collapses the very process that builds the brain’s architecture of expertise.

Basically it means you end up knowing about things, but not knowing them.

The Illusion of Learning

We all get how AI feels intelligent and that's because it’s fluent. It gives us structure, context, and summary in a matter of seconds. But we have to understand that comprehension isn’t the same as connection. This is what psychologists call the illusion of learning: it's the sense that we’ve mastered something just because it now feels simple.

The 2025 MIT preprint Your Brain on ChatGPT illustrates this beautifully in my opinion. Participants who used AI to write essays showed 30–40 percent lower neural engagement and 23 percent weaker recall than those who wrote without it. Even after they stopped using AI, their engagement didn’t bounce back immediately. The researchers called it “cognitive debt.” And that’s what I’m starting to see inside businesses every day: cognitive debt disguised as productivity. We look smarter because our work looks cleaner, our outputs faster. But the underlying thinking and the connective tissue of understanding is thinning out.

When Retail Stops Thinking

Retail has always been a business of pattern recognition. The best merchants and marketers don’t just look at data; they feel it. They notice the rhythm in behaviour, the small shifts in emotion that signal change.

But when every brand asks the same tool the same questions, that instinct dulls. I call it cognitive homogenisation and it's when everyone is technically right, but emotionally identical and looking the same. For me the problem isn’t that AI gives bad answers. It’s that it often stops people from generating their own. And once leaders become validated by the coherence of AI, they stop searching for tension. Tension used to be the spark and the uncomfortable middle ground between what we believed and what we didn’t yet understand. It’s the stretch that forces growth, the debate that sharpens direction, the pause that prevents premature decisions.

I’ve seen it happen in rooms across fashion, tech,retail and just life in general. Teams who once debated fiercely now nod along to a beautifully formatted AI report. It feels informed, it feels efficient, but what’s really happened is that the room’s curiosity has been outsourced.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: The hardest challenge in business today isn’t changing the strategy. It’s changing the mind that built it.

AI is making leaders so confident in their logic that the challenge to change arrives long before the challenge itself.

Why It’s Making Us Dumber

When people say “AI is making us dumber,” it always sounds a little dramatic to me. But here’s what’s actually going on inside the brain and the business:

• Reduced cognitive effort. The brain stops doing the organisational heavy lifting, which means fewer neural connections form.

• Weaker synaptic reinforcement. It means without retrieval or repetition, memory decays faster.

• Loss of metacognition. This is when the machine always sounds right, we stop questioning whether we are.

• Cognitive offloading. We remember where to find answers, but not what they are.

• Overconfidence bias. Fluency creates the illusion of accuracy; speed replaces scrutiny and critical thinking.

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So, just so we are all clear and on the same page, AI isn’t erasing intelligence, it’s just replacing thinking with feeling finished. And that distinction really matters.

Cognitive Debt at Scale

In organisations, cognitive debt (when we trade understanding for efficiency) compounds really fast.

When we rely too much on AI to generate creative campaigns, range plans, or strategy decks, the immediate gain is always speed. But the hidden cost is always cultural: it's the slow erosion of our collective intelligence. Our teams lose the why behind their decisions and any new hires just inherit logic they never built. The business starts to move like a perfectly optimised system that no longer knows what it believes in and that unfortunately is when creativity collapses. The bit we are missing to see is that creativity isn’t born in efficiency, it’s born in friction.

The Emotional Cost

There’s another layer a lot of us are missing or don’t see and that's the emotional one. So with AI, it doesn’t just make work easier; it makes it safer. It removes the risk of being wrong and the discomfort of doubt. But emotional safety, when overused, always turns into intellectual complacency. I’ve sat with executives who are so affirmed by AI-supported data that they’ve lost their appetite for challenge. They get validated into stagnation. This is how emotional intelligence erodes in leadership, when curiosity is replaced by confirmation, the empathy dies with it and its simple, you can’t have empathy without uncertainty.

How Smart People (You) Use AI to Get Sharper

Firstly the solution isn’t avoidance. It’s really just awareness. The smartest people I know don’t use AI to answer questions, they use it to ask better ones.

At IGU Global, we teach what we call the Smarter AI Thinking Framework which is a way to preserve the human depth inside machine-accelerated environments.

We Start Cold. Before prompting, think. Ten minutes. Write hypotheses, questions, instincts. That’s the warm-up for the brain’s processing stage.

Ask for a Hint, Not a Solution. Use AI to widen the field of view, not to finish the thought.

“Give me one new angle I haven’t considered but don’t complete the answer.”

Explain It Back. Every AI-generated idea should be followed by a human explanation. If you can’t explain the logic, you have fallen into cognitive bypass and you don’t own it. It's easy to do so stay on your toes.

Source Check. Always compare AI insights with the frontline truth, that store data, customer conversations, lived experience. That’s where the accuracy lives.

Retrieval Minute. End each session by recalling, from memory, the three insights that matter most. Remember, if you can’t recall them, you never really processed them.

These small rituals re-engage the parts of the brain that AI leaves idle and studies show they can increase retention and understanding by up to 60 percent.

The Positive Vision

In my opinion AI isn’t killing creativity so we have to get over that. What it is doing is testing it. The competitive edge isn’t about who adopts the latest model and can’t tell how many are still focused on that as winning, it’s about who still knows how to think around it. Use AI to create tension, not validation. Ask it to reveal your blind spots, not confirm your brilliance and let it challenge your first idea instead of perfecting it. The future of leadership is going to be all about the toggle or ability to shift between machines (for speed) and humans (for making sense) . That's the new craft of thinking.

The Takeaway

The true fact is we’re not getting dumber because of AI. We’re getting dumber because we’ve stopped doing the thinking it replaces. The intelligence that matters most in this next chapter for me won’t be artificial, it will be emotional and we will soon see who has the ability to hold uncertainty, to stay with the tension long enough for something real to emerge.

So here's the challenge, before you type your next prompt, pause.

 Ask yourself: “What might I be bypassing or skipping right now?”

Getting the answer the fastest isn't always the win. Sometimes it's who can slow down the best in order to process and think about it the deepest.