Borrowed Intelligence

The last big recommendation you signed off on, the one you were really confident about. Whose thinking was that actually? Yours? Or did something very fluent hand it to you, finished and you just agreed? See, that pause you just felt, that's the talk. I call it borrowed intelligence, and honestly, once you see it, you can't stop seeing it. It's everywhere, brilliant people, presenting brilliant answers, and somewhere in the middle, you ask them why, and there's this little flicker, because the why isn't theirs. And here's the bit I find fascinating. Nobody chose this. Nobody woke up and said, right, today I'll stop thinking. The machine's answers are just so good that thinking became optional. And when did anyone ever keep doing something optional? And everyone assumes I'm about to say, use less AI. No, the best leaders I've studied, thousands of them, are the heaviest users in the building. But they do this one thing differently, and it's almost cheeky, they argue with it. They treat the most confident voice in the room like a very clever colleague who's occasionally magnificently wrong. And the gap between those leaders and the polite nodders? That's the whole game now. So when I do this on stage, I play a trick on the room. I make everyone answer a hard question, before they see what the AI says. 2000 people, and the sound when they compare the two that little O rippling around the auditorium? Best sound in my job. They're still arguing about it at the bar. Because here's the thing, everyone's got the same AI now, same models, same answers. So the last advantage left is the person holding it. That's the conversation. Bring it to your stage, your audience will finish it without you.