25d • The Weekly Stack
Hot Take: AI is making agency owners dumber
There, I said it.
Before you come at me, I'm not anti-AI. I use it every day. But there's a difference between using AI as a lever and using it as a crutch, and I'm watching a lot of smart people quietly slide from one to the other without even noticing.
Here's what I'm seeing in the wild: agency owners who can't write a client email without running it through ChatGPT first. Media buyers who can't diagnose a failing campaign without asking an AI to interpret the data for them. Strategists who've stopped having original ideas and instead prompt their way to a deliverable that sounds smart but has no actual thinking behind it.
The problem isn't the output. The output looks fine. The problem is what's happening to the muscle underneath. Critical thinking is a skill. Strategic reasoning is a skill. Writing with a distinct voice is a skill. And like any skill, if you stop using it, it atrophies.
We are collectively offloading cognitive work at a pace that should genuinely concern us, and we're calling it efficiency. Think about GPS. The research on this is pretty clear, people who rely on GPS heavily show measurable decline in spatial navigation ability. Their hippocampus literally changes.
Now ask yourself honestly: what's happening to your thinking when you let AI do the heavy lifting on strategy, analysis, and communication every single day?
I'm not saying don't use it. I'm saying be intentional about where you use it. Use AI to execute faster on things you already know how to do. Don't use it to skip the part where you actually have to think.
Because here's the business reality: the agency owners who are going to win over the next five years aren't the ones who are the best at prompting. They're the ones who bring genuine strategic judgment that AI can't replicate, and that judgment only comes from years of hard thinking that you can't outsource.
If you're using AI to avoid the hard mental work, you're not building leverage. You're borrowing against your own future capability. And at some point the debt comes due, usually when a sharp client asks you a question that requires real thinking and you realize you've been on autopilot for two years.
The agencies that figure out how to use AI without losing their edge are going to be in a completely different league than the ones who leaned into it uncritically.
So here's what I want to know: do you agree that we're seeing real cognitive decline in our industry because of AI overuse or do you think I'm being alarmist?
Drop your honest take below.
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Hot Take: AI is making agency owners dumber
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