I was having lunch last week with a friend who is a college professor. He told me that several of his students turned in project assignments with the AI prompts still included. They did not even take the time to read their own reports. They pasted the AI output into a document and submitted it.
When he talked to the class about it, they did not seem especially concerned. Their view was that AI is a tool they will use after college, so they might as well use it now. I said the same thing about calculators when I was in high school, but this feels different. As long as I pushed the right buttons, I knew the calculator would give me the correct answer. AI does not work that way.
I am seeing a similar pattern in the business world.
I am often asked to review planning documents and strategic recommendations for clients. If you do not know much about strategy, they look pretty good. If you’ve been doing strategy work as long as I have, they look awful. The reports have sophisticated analyses, elegant frameworks, and fancy graphs that create the illusion of rigor. Under scrutiny, they fall apart. The result looks like strategy, but bears little resemblance to something that would actually work in the real world.
What troubles me is not that people are using AI. Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool. I use it aggressively. Work that used to take me days to complete I can accomplish in hours. But I am working in areas where I have expertise. I’m using AI as a thought partner, not to replace my thinking. The danger comes when people outsource their thinking to AI and simply accept its output as fact without applying critical thinking.
A habit many of us need to unlearn starts in school.
For years, we were rewarded for finding the right answer. If you wanted an A on the test, your job was to identify the one correct response. That mindset serves us well in mathematics and a handful of technical disciplines where there really is a single right answer.
Most of the decisions we make are different. There is rarely one perfect strategy, one correct decision, or one obvious way to solve a difficult problem. More often, there are several reasonable options, each with its own strengths, weaknesses, risks, and tradeoffs. Good judgment comes from exploring those possibilities before deciding which one fits the situation best.
That same discipline applies to AI.
Instead of accepting the first answer, we need to ask additional questions. Challenge the assumptions. Ask for alternative approaches. Look for weaknesses in the reasoning.
The future will not belong to people who can generate the fastest answer. It will belong to people who can recognize the best one.
Organizations are expecting more from the people they bring in to speak.
A strong keynote still matters. But leaders are also looking for practical tools, planning support, useful takeaways, and someone who understands the pressure behind the event.
John Spence does not just walk on stage, deliver a keynote, and leave. He works with you as a trusted partner from the first planning conversation through the final follow-up.
