As organizations rush into AI adoption, most of the attention is on productivity gains. Less visible—and far more consequential—is the erosion of the one capability that will actually differentiate companies in an AI-saturated market: judgment.
Judgment is not talent. It is training. It comes from wrestling with information, resolving ambiguity, noticing patterns, and anchoring those patterns to the real world. That cycle builds the internal models that guide good decisions.
AI interrupts that cycle. It retrieves the information. It organizes the signals. It synthesizes the patterns. It presents the conclusions in polished, persuasive language.
When humans stop doing the upstream work, their judgment capacity weakens. They lose the grounding that comes from firsthand cognitive struggle. Over time, the organization becomes confident in its decisions without having the discernment to evaluate them. This is judgment decay.
Judgment is born from wrestling with information. If AI takes over the wrestling, humans lose the ability to judge.
Why does this matter competitively? Because as AI tools converge, the differentiating edge shifts upward. When every company has access to the same models, the same agents, the same automation, the only remaining advantage is the quality of the humans who interpret the landscape and choose direction. Judgment becomes strategy’s last defensible frontier.
And here’s the deeper challenge: judgment doesn’t scale easily. It develops slowly, unevenly, and through direct interaction with messy information. If your teams lose the habit and the muscle of that work, you will not be able to rebuild it quickly. Attrition will hollow it out further. Growth will dilute what remains.
Meanwhile, competitors who protect their judgment layer—who keep people close enough to the information to maintain their internal models—will pull ahead. They will see what others miss. They will correct when others drift. They will make decisions that land.
So yes, AI can make your company “stupider,” but only if you treat AI as a total replacement for thinking. If you design your workflows so that humans stay engaged at the places where judgment is formed, AI becomes an accelerant rather than a solvent.
