An anonymous real example
At the end of a personal session, a leader recognised that they had often been looking for confirmation of an answer. The useful shift was to use AI for a broader exploratory journey: refining the questions, widening the perspective and challenging what they had assumed.
The assumption worth revisiting.
Experience remains valuable. The question is whether the conditions that made it useful still hold. A convincing strategy paper can inherit an old view of customers, work or competition without making that view visible. The business may then move faster in a direction it has not properly reconsidered.
Which assumption in our strategy would we be least comfortable discovering is no longer true?
Give the capacity a purpose.
Protect time to examine the premises of a live strategic decision. Use AI to generate alternatives and uncomfortable questions, then explore them with customers and colleagues who can challenge the account.
How this fits the capacity allocation →
Use AI to challenge your first interpretation
Here is our current strategy and why we believe it. Which assumptions does it depend on? Develop an alternative interpretation that would change the decision. What evidence should we seek before believing either account?
Treat the answers as possibilities to test with people and evidence.
Go deeper into the evidence.
ACM CHI 2025; Microsoft Research · Peer-reviewed survey
319 knowledge workers supplied 936 examples of AI use. Greater confidence in AI was associated with less reported critical-thinking effort; confidence in one's own ability was associated with more. Thinking shifted toward checking information, integrating output and overseeing the task.
Self-reported correlations. This does not prove AI causes declining intelligence or long-term skill loss.
podcast
AI is everywhere. The agentic organization isn’t—yet
McKinsey · The McKinsey Podcast
Offers a provocative commercial question: what happens to a business advantage when customers can delegate the effort of switching?
Listen or watch for: Which part of your customer advantage depends on the customer finding it hard to act?
About this resource
Consultancy interpretation and scenarios; the customer-agent example is hypothetical, not an observed universal P&L effect.