The trust network you turned off
You didn't lose your ability to decide. You lost the people who helped you do it.
Every leader has an informal trust network. It doesn't appear on any org chart, but it works: the CFO of another company you bump into at the quarterly event, the mentor available for coffee when things get rough, the partner who knows the context without you having to explain from scratch.
Before a big decision, you tap into that network. Not to shift responsibility, but to test your reasoning with someone you respect.
AI changed this in a quiet way. Instead of replacing these people, it eliminated the reason to reach out to them. The AI's answer arrives in 10 seconds. Your trusted colleague takes a day to reply, needs context, has their own agenda. So you gradually stopped calling. Without any conscious decision, the habit dried up.
The result is asymmetric: decisions got faster, the infrastructure of interpersonal trust got weaker.
And the cost of this doesn't show up day to day. It shows up when the model confidently gets something wrong that truly matters, and you realize you no longer have anyone to call to check. The network that served as a second pair of eyes was turned off through disuse, not through neglect. Through accumulated convenience.
When the model doesn't know the answer, the network that used to replace that certainty no longer exists.
Save this post. And tell me in the comments: when was the last time you genuinely consulted someone you trust before making a meaningful decision?
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