Writing text.
Coming up with ideas for a project.
Organizing information.
Looking up things you don’t know.
Using generative AI at work is no longer anything special.
Type in a question and an answer comes back in seconds, so in some situations it can greatly boost your efficiency.
At the same time,
“If AI does more of my thinking for me, won’t I have fewer chances to think for myself?”
is a question many people have.
What recent research has been focusing on is not simply “whether to use AI or not,” but “what to leave to AI”.
Does Trusting AI More Mean Putting Less Effort into Thinking?
In 2025, a research team from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University surveyed 319 knowledge workers who use generative AI in their jobs to examine the relationship between generative AI and critical thinking.
The study analyzed real work examples in which participants had used generative AI, including how much critical thinking they had engaged in.
The results showed that the more people trusted AI’s capabilities, the less effort they tended to put into critical thinking.
Conversely, people with greater confidence in their own abilities tended to engage in more critical thinking.
However, from this study we cannot conclude that
“using AI lowers our ability to think itself”.
The key point is not that using AI makes people stop thinking altogether, but that the kind of thinking people do may change.
In the Age of AI, Is “Thinking” Shifting to “Evaluating”?
Before generative AI, if you were writing something, you had to come up with everything yourself, starting with the very first sentence.
With AI, though, you can produce a first draft in seconds.
As a result, people’s work changes
from writing text from scratch
↓
to reviewing text that AI has written.
The same goes for planning.
Instead of coming up with ten ideas yourself, you have AI suggest some, and then
“This one is usable.”
“This one isn’t realistic.”
“This part is wrong.”
“This perspective is missing.”
you evaluate them.
In other words, rather than AI making thinking unnecessary, the human role may be shifting from “generating” to “checking, evaluating, choosing, and revising”. That’s another way to see it.
That’s why the way we use our minds also changes, depending on whether we adopt AI’s answers as they are or use them as raw material.
“Leaving It to AI” Isn’t Bad in Itself
Handing off tasks we used to do in our heads to tools or our external environment is called “cognitive offloading”.
For example:
Putting appointments in a calendar instead of memorizing them.
Leaving calculations to a calculator.
Letting a navigation app find the route to your destination.
These are all forms of cognitive offloading.
Generative AI can be seen as a new form of it.
In 2026, research appeared that distinguishes between using AI in a way that hands over our thinking dependently and using it as an aid while keeping our own thinking intact, looking at how we offload cognition to generative AI.
In other words, the issue is not
“leaving things to AI” itself, but “what to leave to AI and what to think through yourself”.
④ From “Asking for Answers” to “Having AI Ask You Back”
So how should we use AI at work?
Say you’re coming up with a new project idea.
One approach is to leave everything to AI from the start:
“Come up with a new project idea.”
You could simply hand it all over like that.
But if you ask,
“I’m considering options A and B. What are the weaknesses of each?”
“If you were against this project, what would you see as the problems?”
“List the perspectives I’m overlooking.”
“Think about this from the position opposite to this conclusion.”
AI’s role changes.
It becomes not something that creates answers for you, but a partner that helps broaden your own thinking.
This approach can be one good option, especially in work with no single right answer, such as business decisions, planning, and writing.
Of course, AI’s answers may contain errors.
In the end,
“Is this really correct?”
“What do I think?”
“Which should I adopt?”
are decisions for us humans to make.
⑤ In the Age of AI, Make Time to Think for Yourself
Generative AI will likely become even more convenient from here on.
That said, doing everything yourself without AI isn’t necessarily best either.
By leaving tasks such as summarizing, organizing, and drafting to AI, you may be able to spend more time on important decisions and creative work.
What matters is
not “Did I use AI?” but “What did I think about after using AI?”
At La HEAD, in a calm, fully private room, you can step away from your computer and smartphone, close your eyes, and let us slowly care for not just your head but your neck, shoulders, and arms.
Now that AI has sped up our work and lets us process more information than ever, it’s all the more important to make time to step away from the screen on purpose.
Not having AI “think for you,” but using AI to “deepen your own thinking.”
This may become an important perspective as we consider how to live and work with generative AI.