There is a version of AI adoption that worries me.
Not the version where the technology gets the facts wrong. That problem is visible. People are working on it.
The version that worries me is quieter. It is the version where the answer arrives, and we accept it. Not because we checked. Not because we questioned it. Because we were in a hurry, and moving forward felt like progress.
That is a palm down relationship with technology. The machine holds the answer. You receive it. Done.
Palm Up with AI.
Palm up, applied to technology, means treating the answer as a starting point rather than a conclusion.
You ask not just what the AI said, but why. You use the response to go deeper, not to stop. You bring the same curiosity to the machine that you would bring to a sharp colleague whose thinking you respect but do not follow blindly.
This is not a debate about whether AI is right or wrong. It is useful, often genuinely so. The question is not about the technology. The question is about what happens to the person using it, and what habit is being built with every interaction.
If the habit is get the answer and move, we are outsourcing something that cannot be outsourced without consequence.
"The information age created the illusion that having access to answers was the same as understanding. The AI age is accelerating that illusion."
The Habit That Gets Built.
My concern about the current moment is straightforward. The reliance on technology, on social media, on reading only the headline, these are gradually eroding the muscle of deep thinking. Not dramatically. Quietly. One accepted answer at a time.
When you take only the headline, you have given it palm down authority over your thinking. When you go further, when you ask why the AI gave that answer, what assumptions it made, what it might not know, you have kept the intellectual authority where it belongs. With you.
That is not skepticism for its own sake. It is intellectual ownership. And it is the difference between people who use AI as a tool and people who, gradually and without noticing, become dependent on it.
What This Asks of Anyone Who Leads.
The most intellectually alive organizations I have been part of share a trait. The most experienced people are the most curious. They ask more questions than they answer. They treat new information as an invitation to go further, not permission to stop.
The question is not whether your team is using AI. They are, and they should be. The question is whether the culture you've built encourages them to think alongside it, or defer to it.
Palm up environments produce teams that bring judgment to what the machine offers. Palm down environments produce teams that are efficient, perhaps, but not teams that are genuinely thinking.
Hold your hands open. Take what the machine offers.
Then think about it.