I’ve felt a pull recently to recentre myself in my business. I’ve been trying to open corporate doors, unsuccessfully, and I’ve decided that it’s taking up energy that could be better spent elsewhere.

That’s quite a thing to admit, i.e. something that hasn’t turned out how I’d hoped, but c’est la vie.

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 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.

So far, the emerging AI ecosystem has been shaped mostly by a narrow demographic: male, white, and well-resourced.

If AI is the new engine of society, and if it’s trained, built, and maintained mostly by one segment of the population, we should be asking: whose needs will it serve? Whose voices will it amplify, and whose will it overlook?

A comprehensive study published in the journal Societies sheds light on a concerning trend: that individuals aged 17–25 exhibit the highest reliance on AI tools and, correspondingly, the lowest scores in critical thinking assessments. The research indicates a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, underpinned by increased cognitive offloading.

As young adults delegate more cognitive tasks to AI, their capacity for independent analysis and problem-solving diminishes.

Do you hire sheeple or people?

Generative AI has arguably brought an even bigger shake-up to the way we work than the pandemic did.

Will it help or hinder your staff?

In recent years, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has evolved from an optional initiative to an essential element of business strategy. Companies that are purpose-driven and proactive in their CSR approaches tend to see greater loyalty, engagement and trust from their consumers. As we look toward 2025, CSR trends are leaning even further into innovation and accountability. Here’s a look at the CSR trends that are having the biggest impact across industries.