Dive Brief:
- CHROs view critical thinking as one of the most important capabilities for employees in an artificial intelligence-enabled workplace, but 3 out of 4 employees say it and other skills — like human judgment — are beginning to erode due to AI, according to the results of an IBM study published Monday.
- The findings could spell trouble for adoption generally, as 80% of CHROs surveyed said they believe that AI adoption creates “invisible” work for employees in the form of tasks such as validating recommendations and fixing errors. Nearly half of employee respondents agreed that AI added to their workloads, but significantly fewer said that managing the tech’s outputs would be an important skill in the future.
- AI has demonstrated value in some workplace contexts, but its potential effects on human cognition have raised alarm in multiple recent studies. Such findings have led researchers to caution employers to take greater care in deciding how the tech is adopted and how employees will be trained.
Dive Insight:
IBM’s report touches upon a theme identified in other studies. Namely, as workers use AI for various processes rather than engaging with those processes directly, they may lose familiarity and expertise, researchers at the University of Bath said earlier this year.
AI’s negative effects on critical thinking are pronounced for younger employees, according to Cangrade, an AI-based candidate screening platform. The company’s 2026 report found that younger workers had below-average critical thinking, attention to detail and problem solving skills, which it similarly identified as essential to operating in an AI-enabled environment.
IBM’s report identified a few strategies employers could use to help early-career talent build such skills:
- Rotations
- Supervised decision-making
- Coaching
- Earlier customer exposure
The company also recommended building judgment and accountability directly into workflows. It found that, in workplaces where judgment is built into work, 62% of CHROs reported increased employee confidence in AI-enabled decisions. Where judgment was not so integrated, 57% of CHROs reported declining confidence.
“As AI takes on more routine and process-driven tasks, uniquely human capabilities become even more important,” Nickle LaMoreaux, senior VP and CHRO at IBM, said in the company’s press release. “CHROs have a critical role to play in redesigning the workplace of the future so people can focus on the areas where they can have the greatest impact.”
Past studies have also identified potential issues concerning overreliance on generative AI. A multinational group of researchers said in an August article that managers may experience “epistemic de-skilling” as a result of overuse, leaving them less able to build moral insights and contextual understanding.