AI is making work easier, but is it making us think less?

This Women’s Month, much of the conversation will focus on how women can access leadership and growth opportunities in an AI-driven economy. However, we must ensure that the skills and qualities that have historically allowed women to rise to the leaders they are today are not lost in the rush towards AI.

Deloitte’s legal sector surveys illustrate the speed of this transformation. In 2024, 76% of respondents reported no AI adoption. Just two years later, that figure has fallen to 2%, while 61% of respondents have reported actively deploying AI across legal work.

However, unlike previous technology rollouts, where organisations could clearly define use cases, processes and expected outcomes from the outset, AI adoption has been largely driven on a crowdsourcing basis. The technology has essentially been let loose, and employees have been encouraged to explore it for themselves, identify efficiencies and discover new ways of working as they go.

One of the risks associated with this approach is the uneven access to and take-up of these technologies, and the potentially detrimental impact on long-term career trajectories. While no definitive studies have yet identified why this occurs, anecdotal evidence and early-stage usage patterns suggest that advanced AI adoption may not be occurring uniformly across all groups, with some reports indicating lower levels of uptake among women.

Importantly, this is not a question of ability. Rather, it highlights a potential disparity in access to opportunity that organisations need to understand and address. This observation is made without assigning blame. Differential usage may arise from a range of factors, including personal choice, confidence levels, risk tolerance, organisational culture, or structural barriers. The underlying cause, however, is less important than the outcome. Where unequal access to opportunity results in unequal outcomes, organisations should take steps to understand and address the disparity.  As AI becomes increasingly embedded in the workplace, it is likely to have a growing influence on productivity, visibility, capability development and, ultimately, career progression. Those who embrace these technologies early may be better positioned to access the opportunities they create, while those who hold back risk being left behind.

Our focus is therefore to continue creating spaces where people can experiment without pressure to be proficient. We are also actively role modelling female expertise in this area, and celebrating progress, not just mastery. 

Yet beyond driving equitable adoption, a second and equally important consideration is how we guard against cognitive decline in experienced users.

The danger is that these tools are incredibly addictive, and it’s all too easy to let our bias towards the results they produce lull us into a misguided trust in the outcomes. This is because AI is remarkably good at producing convincing answers. Over time, it becomes tempting to accept those answers at face value rather than interrogate them. We routinely tell users to verify all content, use their own critical thinking skills, and remain responsible for everything they generate. While all of that is true, it is easier said than done. The convenience of AI can create a subtle form of dependency, where the path of least resistance increasingly involves asking a system to do more of the thinking on our behalf.

This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: if technology increasingly performs the cognitive tasks that once helped us develop expertise, what happens to the critical thinking skills that expertise depends on?

Critical thinking, judgement, creativity and contextual understanding are not developed through passive consumption of answers. They are developed through questioning assumptions, weighing competing perspectives, testing ideas and learning from mistakes. As women, the outcomes we produce from these processes are often incredibly nuanced based on our lived experience as females within the workplace. If these processes are increasingly outsourced to machines, we risk weakening the very capabilities that distinguish skilled, female professionals from everyone else.

This challenge is especially pertinent for women in leadership positions. Many of us have built our careers through experience, learning, collaboration, and resilience. As AI reshapes the workplace, we have the opportunity and a level of responsibility to ensure that the next generation develops those same capabilities and doesn’t fall into the trap of being heavily reliant on technology in their respective roles. The goal is not to compete with AI but to instil the human judgement and critical thinking that technology cannot replace.

This concern extends beyond the workplace. My daughters are in their late teens and early twenties and belong to a generation that has grown up with constant access to digital technology. Recently, my eldest remarked that it had become increasingly common for her friends to ask their preferred GenAI model for appropriate responses to even the most mundane interpersonal conversations.

This reliance on GenAI to support (replace?) normal social interactions may well apply to a generation, rather than a gender group. As the mother of two young women though, I wonder why we think that platitudes from a large language model are more impressive, or safer, than our own words in everyday conversations? And won’t the consequence be that we’ll increasingly lose the confidence to conceive and articulate ideas, from the mundane and everyday to the complex and advanced?

The implications may be particularly significant for young women entering the workforce, but experienced female professionals are not immune. In a world where women routinely have to deliver beyond their male counterparts, expertise is not simply about knowing the right answer. It is the product of years of analysis, interpretation, critical evaluation, and confidence to back our decision-making. If AI takes on an increasing share of those cognitive tasks, female leaders, and those they lead, must be intentional about continuing to exercise the reasoning and judgement that underpin genuine expertise.

The future generation of women leaders will not only be measured by their ability to lead in a highly AI-inclusive environment but also by the way they use their independent thinking, good judgement and genuine leadership skills.

//By Retha Beerman, Director of Knowledge Management at Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr