Humans have offloaded cognition to tools since ancient times, from the first tally mark to calculators and GPS devices. What makes generative AI (GenAI) different is the nature of the work it performs. Unlike previous tools, GenAI doesn’t merely support human thinking; increasingly, it substitutes for it, with consequences for a specific set of human skills. A growing body of research points to cognitive debt—the gradual erosion of critical thinking, judgment, curiosity, and originality among frequent AI users.

But the larger danger is not what happens to an individual employee; it is what happens when skill erosion occurs simultaneously across hundreds or thousands of people in an organization. We call this distributed de-skilling—a collective erosion of human skills that undermines organizational intelligence and resilience over time. This phenomenon is not a talent problem, but a system design problem rooted in how the organization builds governance, workflows, and culture around AI.

In a global study of 70 C-suite leaders and senior executives across multiple industries, we found that half are already observing de-skilling in their organizations, and more than 60% believe that de-skilling will pose a material threat within the next three to five years. On the basis of these leaders’ firsthand accounts, as well as interviews that we conducted with a dozen other company leaders, we’ve identified the organizational implications of distributed de-skilling, the skills that are most vulnerable to it, and some of the mitigation strategies that leaders are deploying to combat it.