A group of endoscopists, each with more than two thousand colonoscopies behind them, spent months using an AI tool that flagged polyps they might miss. When researchers took the tool away, their unassisted accuracy dropped from 28.4 percent to 22.4 percent.
Nobody would have caught that drop by watching their work with the tool running. Their numbers looked fine the entire time. The gap only showed up the moment the AI disappeared.
That’s what got my attention this week. Not that doctors are using AI, everyone already knows that. What struck me is that the erosion stayed completely invisible until the exact moment it mattered most.
Physician use of these tools tripled in a single year, from 10 percent to 38 percent. Seventy seven percent of physicians and seventy percent of nurses already told researchers they’re worried about losing their skills. Turns out they were right to worry.
And this isn’t a healthcare story. Microsoft’s CEO confirmed that roughly 30 percent of the company’s code is now written by AI. Salesforce hired no new engineers this year and is shrinking its support team from nine thousand people to about five thousand.
Cut the entry-level rung today and there’s no senior person in ten years who has done the work enough times to catch the machine when it’s confidently wrong. That’s the trade nobody puts on a slide.
Aviation figured this out decades ago. As autopilot took over more of the flying, pilots quietly got worse at hand-flying.
Regulators noticed after the 2009 crash of Air France 447. The FAA now requires pilots to switch off the automation and fly manually on a regular basis, because a skill nobody practices is a skill that’s already fading.
Three things protect a team against this:
- Schedule unassisted repetitions so people keep practicing the core skill without the tool.
- Track how your team performs when the AI goes down, so you’re not finding out for the first time during an actual outage.
- Protect your entry-level roles, because that’s where the judgment gets built that catches the machine’s mistakes years from now.
This Week
This week, pick one core skill your team has started routing entirely through AI. Ask an honest question: could your people still do it well tomorrow if the tool went dark? Schedule one unassisted trial of that skill before the month ends, and see what you learn.
Hit reply and tell me what you find. I read every one.
I publish Leapfrogging the Headlines to help leaders cut through the noise, gain clarity on what’s happening, and make smarter decisions. Subscribe below to get each issue delivered free.
Join 30,000+ other leaders