We tend to assume that time saved becomes value created, but there’s nothing automatic about that. If somebody saves six hours a week using AI and those six hours are simply filled with more emails, more meetings or a higher expectation of output, the business has certainly increased its capacity. Whether it has become more innovative is another matter.

It may simply have become faster.

There’s a human behaviour problem sitting underneath this. If I find a way of completing my workload much more efficiently and my reward is even more work, I’m likely to learn something fairly quickly about announcing my next ‘efficiency’.

We can now generate summaries of documents we might once have read ourselves, which is useful until the summary becomes a substitute for understanding. If something important has been omitted, we’d be blithely unaware.

It could well be that this lost clause or definition is never needed or referred to, but if it is, it will be when something has gone horribly wrong.

A company can know more about its activity than ever before while still misunderstanding what’s happening within it.

The most useful question is not be whether it has enough information to act, but whether it has tested the story that the information appears to tell.

Participants can surprise themselves as much as they surprise everyone else. Before long, they’re not merely taking part but shaping the argument.

The version of themselves who ‘doesn’t do this sort of thing’ has apparently taken a brief leave of absence.

People are able to form fixed opinions about strangers from a short recording or somebody else’s description of an event. They become angry with anyone who interprets the same fragments differently. AI now gives those opinions structure and an appearance of authority. It can make an untested belief sound like a considered judgement.

My concern isn’t simply that this will produce more keyboard warriors. I’m more troubled by what it might do to curiosity

The world our young people are entering is changing faster than any curriculum can realistically keep pace with.

Some of the jobs they'll eventually do don't exist yet. Many of the problems they'll solve haven't yet appeared.

Recently, I've found myself wondering what role artificial intelligence might play in this area. Not because I believe AI is creating psychopaths. What interests me is whether some of the ways we interact with AI could gradually influence how we process empathy, guilt, and accountability.

We need to teach children to interrogate everything. Not with anxiety, but with curiosity. To hold up a piece of information and turn it slowly in the light. To understand that a deepfake isn’t just a technical trick: it’s a weapon, and someone made it for a reason.

To ask not just ‘what does this say?’ but ‘what does this want from me?’

And we need to model this for them.

This matters most when decisions are later challenged. If an outcome is questioned, the explanation cannot rest solely on what the system produced. The algorithm will not sit in a witness box. A person will.

That person may point to validated models, risk thresholds, and compliance processes, yet beneath all of that lies a human judgement: the judgement to rely on the system, to accept its output, to refrain from overriding it.

If the reasoning process becomes opaque even to those who are responsible for its consequences, accountability shifts from something lived to something theoretical.

Leaders may still sign off decisions, yet their capacity to interrogate the underlying thinking diminishes if they have no experiential sense of how that thinking was formed.

If you can’t reconstruct how a decision was formed, what assumptions were accepted, what alternatives were rejected, and where human judgement intervened, you don’t really have a decision at all. You have an artefact: a thing that exists, but one that can’t defend itself. In regulated sectors, that’s a compliance issue waiting to happen. In unregulated ones, it’s a reputational risk that just hasn’t found its trigger yet.

If we don’t actively teach people how to question, how to verify, how to tolerate being wrong, and how to think independently of algorithms, we risk creating a society that functions efficiently but thinks very little.

And that’s the quiet fear running through all of these comments. Not that AI will become too intelligent. But that we’ll stop becoming intelligent ourselves.

When the last line of integrity falters, the entire system shakes. Because if the CCRC cannot be trusted to act independently, who can?

It’s not about whether Jeremy Bamber is innocent or guilty; it’s about whether we can trust our institutions to care enough to find out.

Critical thinking isn’t just a buzzword. It’s the backbone of every invention, every new idea, every breakthrough product or service. It’s the ability to see connections that others miss, to ask ‘why’ when others say ‘that’ll do’.

But it’s not something that can be downloaded or automated. It’s a muscle that needs constant exercise.

Have we lost confidence in our ability to interpret the world for ourselves? We outsource our judgment to experts, commentators, columnists…and now, machines. We let them do the heavy lifting and tell us what to think. It’s easier to share someone else’s tweet or repeat their soundbite than to sit with a complex issue and admit that the truth isn’t neat, and that maybe no one has the whole picture.

But democracy only really works when citizens question what they’re told.

Both artificial intelligence and criminology are close to my heart, so when I came across the recent Sky News report about an AI tool that can apparently condense ‘81 years of detective work’ into just 30 hours, I felt both a surge of excitement and an instinctive need to investigate.

If four in five employees feel unable to perform at their best, then something isn’t working in the way organisations structure and support the modern workplace. And this isn’t about individuals being lazy or disorganised. It’s a structural issue that demands a structural response.

AI won’t take your job, but someone using it will

Anyone who’s a regular on LinkedIn must have seen this claim. If ever there was a sentence to make business owners sit up and take notice, there it is.

This isn’t referring to a far-off future where robots in suits turn up to your team meeting and make the tea. It’s happening now. The tools already exist, and your competitors are either using them or seriously thinking about doing so.