Who Did the Thinking?

Your best people are producing better work than ever. Are they still doing the thinking?
Generative AI can turn a two-line request into a polished, board-ready analysis in seconds. For the first time in history, a document can look as if it took a week of careful thought when almost none went into it, and nothing on the page tells you which kind you are holding.
Drawing on cognitive psychology, human factors research and more than two decades of running technology-intensive buildings, Dr. Alaa Ahmad shows how AI quietly relocates human thinking. Effort moves from producing work to checking it, and too often the checking never happens. The result is what he calls the illusion of cognitive effort, the belief that careful thought went into work simply because it looks careful.
The book gives you a practical framework built on four moves.
Think Fast. Use your expert intuition, and know when to trust it.
Think Slow. Reason deliberately about evidence and assumptions.
Think Together. Divide the work of a judgment between you and the machine on purpose.
Think Again. Return to AI-assisted work before it becomes a decision, with scrutiny in proportion to the stakes.
Inside you will find the following.
- Real-world cases from boardrooms, control rooms, classrooms and project teams
- The research behind AI overreliance, explained in plain language
- The Explain-to-Self Test, a five-question check before you sign anything AI helped you write
- A ready-to-use toolkit for individuals, educators and leaders, including a ninety-day plan for governing AI in your organisation
- 21 original diagrams that make the ideas easy to apply and share