# As AI Takes Over the Work, Judgment Becomes the Scarce Asset | RISEUP AT WORK LLC

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/369259
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:369259
- Published at: 2026-08-17 14:00:00 UTC
- Updated at: 2026-08-17 14:00:00 UTC

## Author
Dr. Deepak Bhootra

## Subject
RISEUP AT WORK

## Content
A recent Harvard Gazette review asked whether AI is dulling our minds, and assembled a growing body of evidence that, used a certain way, it does. For a career progression company, that is not a threat. It is the tailwind.The evidence is converging. A survey of 666 adults found that frequent AI tool use was negatively correlated with critical thinking, an effect driven almost entirely by cognitive offloading, and that correlated negatively with critical thinking, an effect carried almost entirely by cognitive offloading, and the youngest cohort, aged 17 to 25, showed the highest dependence and the lowest critical thinking scores (Gerlich, 2025). That youngest cohort is our user. In a separate study of 319 knowledge workers, the more a person trusted the AI, the less critical thinking they applied to its output (Lee et al., 2025). A review of the education research frames the mechanism plainly: AI is both amplifier and inhibitor, strengthening thinking when it is used as a partner and eroding it when it becomes a substitute (Jose et al., 2025).Read together, the findings are narrow and useful. The damage does not come from AI. It comes from offloading the thinking instead of doing it alongside the tool. Meanwhile, the offloading is already inside careers: 74 percent of young professionals now use AI daily, and 72 percent lean on it for career advice (Deloitte, 2026).As AI absorbs execution, the skills these studies find most at risk are judgment, evaluation, and reflection. That is precisely what RISEUP is built to develop. Our diagnostics force reflection, our milestones demand a decision, and a coach stays in the loop, which turns AI use into judgment rather than dependence.These results are correlational and partly self-reported, so they show association, not proven decline. The direction is consistent across every study we read. We are not betting against AI. We are building the place people go to keep the judgment it quietly erodes.