We used to have brainstorms. Now we have prompt storms.
A planner walks in with five slides generated by ChatGPT.
The copy sounds clever, the insights look solid, and the pitch feels smooth.

And yet, something’s missing.

You can’t quite name it.
But you feel it: no tension, no edge, no revelation.

That emptiness you sense?
It’s the sound of thinking that’s been outsourced.

The Rise of Cognitive Offloading

We’re not just using AI.
We’re letting it do the thinking for us.

This is called cognitive offloading—the tendency to delegate memory, analysis, and problem-solving to machines rather than engaging with them ourselves.
It started with calculators and calendar alerts. Now it’s full-blown intellectual outsourcing.

In a 2025 study, users who leaned heavily on AI tools like ChatGPT showed:

• Lower performance on critical thinking tasks
• Reduced brain activity in regions linked to reasoning
• Weaker engagement with the tasks themselves

In plain terms:
The more you let the machine think, the less your brain wants to.

The Illusion of Intelligence

AI generates with confidence, speed, and fluency.
But fluency is not insight.
Style is not surprise.

The result?
Teams start accepting the first answer.
They stop asking better questions.
They stop thinking in the messy, nonlinear, soul-breaking way that true strategy demands.

This is how we end up with:

• Briefs that feel like rewrites
• Campaigns that resemble each other
• Creative work that optimizes but never ruptures
• Ads that do not sell and under perform

We are mistaking synthetic coherence for original thought.

Strategy Is Being Eaten by Comfort

In the age of AI, the most dangerous temptation is this:
To feel like you’re being productive while you’re actually avoiding thinking.

Strategy was never about speed.
It was about discomfort. Contradiction. Holding multiple truths.
Thinking strategically means staying longer with the problem, not jumping to solutions.

But AI is built for immediacy.
It satisfies before it provokes.
And that’s the danger: it can trick an entire agency into believing it’s being smart—when it’s just being fast.

AI Isn’t the Enemy. Passivity Is.

Let’s be clear: AI is not a villain.
It’s a brilliant assistant. A stimulator of thought.
The problem begins when we replace thinking with prompting
instead of interrogating the outputs.

Great strategists won’t be the ones who prompt best.
They’ll be the ones who:

• Pause after the first answer
• Spot the lie inside the convenience
• Use AI as a sparring partner, not a surrogate mind

We don’t need better prompts.
We need better questions.

Reclaiming Strategic Intelligence

The sharpest minds in the room used to be the ones who paid attention.
Who read between the trends.
Who felt what was missing in the noise.

That role is still sacred.
But only if we protect the muscle it relies on: critical thought. Pattern recognition. Surprise. Doubt. Curiosity.

If you let a machine decide how you see,
you will forget how to see at all.

Strategy is not a slide deck. It’s a stance.

It’s the act of staring into chaos and naming what matters.

We can let AI handle the heavy lifting
—but only if we still carry the weight of interpretation.

Otherwise, the industry will be filled with fluent nonsense
while true insight quietly disappears.

And what’s left then?

Slogans without soul.
Campaigns without culture.
Minds without friction.

Don’t let the machine think for you.
Use it to go deeper.
Use it to go stranger.
But never stop thinking.

Images via @freepic