“We Need AI” Isn’t a Strategy

Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, organizations have been scrambling to answer one question: How do we use AI?

But "We Need AI" is not a strategy. It's a panic response disguised as innovation.

For some, there are clear places where AI has an obvious, powerful place:

Mastercard uses AI to reduce fraud across billions of transactions in real-time analyzing patterns at a scale and speed impossible for human.

Siemens uses AI-driven predictive maintenance programs which can continuously watch thousands of sensors across vibration, heat, sound, pressure, timing, usage history, and failure patterns and predict failures before they create downtime.

DeepMind's AlphaFold database includes more than 200 million protein structure predictions, covering nearly all catalogued proteins known to science. Work that would have taken humans "hundreds of millions of years" to solve experimentally.

These are not examples of AI replacing human judgment or creativity.

They are examples of AI doing what humans could never feasibly do. That distinction matters because not every organization has a business case like that.

For many, "We Need AI" has become a blanket directive:

• Use it more

• Put it in the workflow

• Automate the task

• Speed it up

• Make people more efficient.

This is where things get dangerous. The easiest things to offload are often the very things people need to practice.

• Writing a hard message

• Thinking through a messy problem

• Giving feedback

• Analyzing information

• Making a judgment call

• Navigating tense situations

• Creating something original

• Explaining what they actually believe

These are not tasks. They're skills that are quintessentially human, and when we delegate too many of them to AI, we lose them. Comedian, Actor and Daily Show Correspondent, Ronny Chieng called this "cognitive offloading" in his 2026 Harvard Class Day address. Cognitive offloading is the habit of using AI to skip the thinking instead of strengthening it. His warning was blunt, but the point was real: use AI for medicine, science, scale, pattern recognition, and complexity. Do not use it as a substitute for creative and critical thinking.

I'm not anti-AI.

We use AI at Medici to scale coaching, personalize experiences, and help people access support they could not otherwise get or afford.

I'm anti-"We Need AI".

The blanket, vague push to integrate something without defining why.

If the task is rote, repetitive, high-volume, or impossible for humans to scale, AI may be the right tool.

But if the task requires creativity, courage, thinking differently – the goal should not be to remove the human. The organizations that win will not be the ones that simply "use AI more".

They will be the ones that know where AI belongs – and where human skill matters most.