Hello Leaders,

Artificial Intelligence is gaining momentum every week and continues to hog the headlines. The three we hand picked are to highlight the challenges you need to prepared for a) to avoid compliance issues and b) to keep your team members' wellbeing in mind.

1. Over dependence on AI can lead to deterioration of cognitive skills

No one can dispute that any skill will deteriorate when it is not used. As our responsibilities shift with AI, our cognitive faculties could deteriorate. This was confirmed by a study conducted by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University. They surveyed 319 knowledge workers and collected 936 examples of tasks being completed using Generative AI. Key implications of the research are

Decision making. As we rely more on AI for decision making, we will get fewer opportunities to practice judgement. When something goes wrong and manual takeover is necessary, we won’t be able to effectively troubleshoot without wide knowledge of the overall system.
Critical Thinking. AI tools produce homogeneous recommendations for a given task. As a result, the outputs we are producing using AI are less diverse. We will get less opportunity to exercise creativity, reflect their views, or think critically.
Hands on Experience. With AI automating many tasks, our responsibilities are shifting from production to verification. For example, a software developer will spend less time writing code and more time verifying. This will limit our hands-on-experience which will further limit their ability to put ideas into practice.
Writing. Novice writers are bypassing the creative writing process when they rely too much on Generative AI. They are not learning the skills to construct logical arguments or spending the time to understand the subject matter.
Memory. There is fear that using AI for search and summarization will reduce the ability to research and learn from the high quality papers and literature.

Further, when we don't use our own labor to complete a task, would we get the sense of satisfaction or accomplishment?

Actions you can take

Instead of focusing on speed, prioritize the use of AI to

improve quality,
mitigate negative consequences of AI generated output,
augment the capabilities of your team members,
etc.

Further Reading

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf

2. Privacy risk with AI notetakers

People are increasingly relying on AI notetakers to transcribe the entire meeting. Your external partners and vendors are inviting the AI notetakers to the meetings.

This makes it very difficult to have any off the record conversations.
Words could be taken out of context and used against individuals.
Makers of the note taking apps will now have “free” training data from our conversations
Over reliance on these tools will degrade the cognitive skills that we have relied on for centuries.

Actions you can take

Encourage in-person engagements to brainstorm ideas
Prohibit the use of note taking apps for all external meetings.
Prohibit its use for internal meetings related to confidential topics, individual’s performance, customer, etc.

Further Reading

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-14/ai-notetakers-in-meetings-are-making-me-queasy

3. Are your LLMs safe?

Hackers continue to find new ways to dupe the LLMs in revealing sensitive information. One researcher injected prompts into Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to permanently plant instructions in its long-term memory. This could potentially be use to instruct the bot to perpetually act on false information. Last August, a similar demonstration was made to target Microsoft Copilot.

Actions you can take