New IBM CHRO Study: AI Puts Critical Thinking at the Center of Workforce Priorities - PR Newswire

IBM's Institute for Business Value asked 1,500 CHROs and 8,800 employees around the world how things were going, and the answer — delivered by press release — is that 60% of employees believe AI is eroding their skills, with critical thinking topping the decay chart. IBM's chosen headline for this is 'AI Puts Critical Thinking at the Center of Workforce Priorities,' which is a bit like a fox announcing that chickens have been promoted to the centre of the farmyard's strategic vision. Full marks for nerve. Ten thousand three hundred respondents between them, and IBM's press office still found the upbeat angle.

The CHROs, meanwhile, were asked what matters most, and 57% said critical thinking while 48% said human judgment. Read that second number again: fewer than half of the people professionally responsible for the human side of the enterprise ranked human judgment in the top tier. One wonders what they did pick. Prompt engineering, most likely.

The remedy, if the genre holds, will be a learning module: 8,800 people surveyed, one dashboard produced, one compliance badge at the end of it. Nobody in the release is quoted saying the obvious thing — that a tool which erodes the very thinking it is meant to support is an expensive way to get worse at your job — because that sentence does not survive legal review. So we get 'priorities' instead. IBM will sell you the AI, study what it did to your head, and publish the findings as thought leadership. Critical thinking was last seen heading for the exit, and the exit now has a focus group.