Unconscious habit versus disciplined cultivation
Much of the public discussion about AI adoption is framed around capability. What can the technology do? Where can it make work faster? What forms of analysis, synthesis, drafting or decision support can be automated?
These are important questions, particularly for organisations trying to understand where AI can create value. Yet the first Leadership in the AI Era convening in New York suggested that another question may be just as important: not simply whether we use AI, but whether we are sufficiently conscious of the habits forming around its use.
Technology rarely enters our lives through a single deliberate decision. More often, behaviour changes incrementally. A tool makes one task easier, then another, and before long a particular way of working has become normal without ever being consciously examined.
With AI, this process is occurring at remarkable speed because the technology is so immediately useful. It can provide a plausible answer before we have fully framed the question, structure an argument before we have worked out what we think or validate a line of reasoning before we have subjected it to meaningful challenge.
The concern is not that this capability is inherently undesirable. On the contrary, its capacity to reduce low-value work and increase access to knowledge represents enormous potential. The tension lies elsewhere: convenience can become habit, and habit can gradually reduce the degree of conscious engagement we bring to the work.
This tension surfaced during the New York convening itself. Participants were invited to grapple with expansive questions about what it means to remain human in a world shaped by increasingly capable artificial intelligence. Yet, as the discussion unfolded, the conversation at times migrated back to more familiar territory: governance, regulation, risk, policy and institutional control.
These matter enormously. But the movement itself was revealing. Faced with genuinely unfamiliar terrain, humans have a natural tendency to return to categories and frameworks we already know how to navigate. AI may amplify this tendency because it is particularly effective at helping us work within existing patterns, extending and refining a line of thought without necessarily asking whether the underlying frame is the right one.
This is where the distinction between unconscious habit and disciplined cultivation becomes useful.
An analogy raised through the conversation helps illustrate the tension.
Modern aviation relies extensively on automation, but automation has not rendered the pilot irrelevant. We do not imagine the pilot of a long-haul aircraft simply disengaging while the computer flies the plane. The nature of the work has changed: the pilot monitors systems, interprets changing conditions, anticipates problems and remains prepared to intervene. Automation performs more of the task, while human responsibility remains.
That may offer a useful way of thinking about leadership in relation to AI.
The question is not whether we should use increasingly capable systems. We will. Nor is it whether the technology can perform significant parts of our work better or faster than we can. Increasingly, it will.
The more important question may be whether we begin to behave like passive passengers or whether we remain active participants in shaping direction, interpreting information and accepting responsibility for outcomes.
As AI becomes embedded in everyday work, disciplined attention may become a more significant leadership capability, not a less important one. Leaders will need to recognise when technology is extending their thinking and when it is simply making familiar assumptions easier to reproduce.
The provocation emerging from New York is deceptively simple:
As AI becomes easier to use, how do we become more conscious about the way we use it?
This is one of the questions we will continue to test as the Leadership in the AI Era convening series progresses.
Leadership in the AI Era is an international convening series led by the Menzies Leadership Foundation in collaboration with the Aspen Institute Socrates Program.
