AI vs. Intuition: Is AI Short-Circuiting How We Develop Professional Expertise?
Image Credit: Copyright ©2017 R. Stevens / CREST (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In her latest piece for The AI Journal, our CEO, Wendy Jephson, explores why firms must shift their focus from mere automation to cognition support. Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for the professional, Wendy illustrates how it can be re-engineered to safeguard and amplify human thinking.
The Expertise Crisis Hidden Inside AI Adoption
We’ve reached a tipping point in 2026. While AI has made law firms and consultancies faster than ever, that speed comes with a hidden tax: the erosion of deep expertise. We are essentially automating ourselves into a "knowledge crisis" where the output is high, but the underlying professional judgment is thinning out.
The Danger of "Short-Circuiting" Thought
The problem with most current AI tools is that they are “too” helpful. By providing instant answers and polished summaries, they bypass the "messy" cognitive heavy lifting—the weighing of trade-offs and navigation of ambiguity—that actually builds an expert's intuition.
As Wendy points out, if we let AI decide what's important, we risk raising a generation of professionals who are fast at executing but slow at sensing patterns. To be "better" rather than just "faster," we need tools that prompt us to think, not just tools that think for us.
Bridging the "Missing Middle"
The "osmosis" model of learning—where juniors soak up wisdom by watching seniors navigate complex cases—is failing in an era of hybrid work and automated workflows. This creates a dangerous gap in talent development.
To fix this "experience-creation problem," firms need to move beyond using AI as a shield that hides work from juniors. Instead, we should use technology to pull the "invisible thinking" out of senior leaders’ heads, making their unwritten rules and mental cues visible and repeatable for the rest of the team (while at the same time improving their own thinking).
From Automation to Cognition Support
The competitive edge today isn't found in who adopts AI the quickest, but who uses it to reinforce human judgment. At Let’s Think, we offer Behavioural Science-led AI that:
Challenges the user with better questions rather than just feeding them answers.
Prompts reflection, helping experts articulate the "why" behind their gut feelings.
Captures institutional wisdom, turning invisible expertise into permanent "Knowledge Assets."
The Choice for the Future
The real risk isn’t that AI will take our jobs; it’s that we will forget how to do the high-level thinking that makes those jobs valuable. Firms that treat AI as a shortcut will eventually hollow out their own intellectual capital. Those that use it to scale and sharpen human judgment will own the future of professional services.
Read Wendy’s full analysis at The AI Journal: Are We Automating Professional Services Into a Knowledge Crisis?
