There is a genuine pleasure in handing a task to an AI and getting back something competent: the draft written, the analysis done, the decision recommended. For many routine jobs this is a real gain, freeing time and effort for things that matter more. But there is a subtler effect worth watching, because it works slowly and pleasantly and is therefore easy to miss. A skill you stop exercising tends to fade. If an AI does all of a certain kind of thinking for you, over time you may become less able to do that thinking yourself - and a business, or a person, that can no longer function well without the tool has acquired a dependency that was never a deliberate choice.
The concern is not that using AI makes people incapable; it is more specific than that. It is that the judgment needed to use AI well is the very judgment that fades if you lean on it uncritically. To catch an AI's mistakes, you have to know enough to notice when something is wrong. To use its output wisely, you need the underlying understanding it appears to make unnecessary. The danger is a loop: the more you rely on the tool, the less you practise the skill; the less you practise, the less able you are to tell when the tool is leading you astray; and the less able you are to tell, the more completely you rely on it. What starts as assistance can drift toward a substitution that hollows out the human competence meant to be supervising it.
This has a sharper edge in a business than for an individual, because businesses institutionalise their habits. A team that routes every judgment through an AI can gradually lose the internal expertise it used to have, until the knowledge lives only in the tool and the ability to sense-check the tool has withered. That is fine while the AI is available and reliable, and a serious exposure the moment it is not - unavailable, changed, wrong in a way nobody is equipped to catch, or simply confidently mistaken on the one occasion it really matters. A business that has quietly deskilled itself has traded a durable capability for a convenient one, often without ever deciding to.
The balance to strike is not rejection but conscious use. Let AI handle the volume and the routine, but keep the human skills that constitute real judgment alive by continuing to exercise them - understanding the work well enough to evaluate what the AI produces rather than merely accepting it, keeping people who genuinely know the domain rather than only how to prompt, and treating the AI's output as a strong draft to be judged rather than an answer to be adopted. The test worth applying periodically is simple: if the tool vanished tomorrow, could the business still think? Keeping the honest answer to that question a yes is what separates using AI as leverage from being quietly captured by it.