Why easy access to AI can weaken business innovation

AI can help businesses work faster, but easy access to instant answers may also weaken the problem-solving skills that support innovation, according to Chengwei Liu, writing for TechRadar.

Liu describes this as a “productivity trap”: workers save time in the short term, while gradually losing opportunities to experiment and think through problems themselves. He cites a 2015 study of computational biologists, which found that access to colleagues’ unfinished work led researchers to spend more time refining existing ideas and less time exploring new approaches.

Liu also describes workplace sessions for sharing AI tools that, over time, yielded fewer new ideas as a small group did most of the exploration. He argues that when AI produces a strategy memo or risk assessment in minutes, workers may skip activities such as speaking with customers, checking figures, and testing assumptions. That could leave teams less able to judge whether AI-generated answers are sound.

His proposed response is “strategic friction”: requiring people to make an independent effort before receiving an AI-generated answer. Examples include drafting a rough assessment first, prompting users for what they already know before generating competitor analysis, or requiring their assumptions before unlocking a risk assessment. Liu says this can help people evaluate and improve AI outputs. He adds that such friction is unnecessary for simple tasks such as formatting slides or summarizing notes.

The article presents these views as Liu’s perspective, published in TechRadar Pro Perspectives.