A senior Goldman Sachs executive is warning that heavy reliance on AI tools could weaken employees' ability to reason independently - a concern gaining traction among HR professionals who worry about the long-term impact on workforce skills.
Chris Churchman, head of Marquee, Goldman Sachs' digital institutional platform, raised the issue in the bank's podcast series "Exchanges," describing the risk of workers outsourcing their thinking to AI models.
"I think there's a huge danger here that in the era of AI, we outsource our reasoning to these models, and we have cognitive atrophy that stops us being able to reason from first principles ourselves," Churchman said. "I think there's a real danger of that."
Churchman pointed to historical examples of skills that faded once technology made them redundant. Humans no longer navigate by memory across vast distances, he said, and few people recite entire books from memory since the printing press made storing text unnecessary. AI, he suggested, now threatens the same decline for reasoning capability.
Churchman emphasized that preserving reasoning skills requires deliberate effort rather than passive adoption of AI tools. He framed his work building products for the firm as a long-term responsibility.
"My North Star here is, I feel a great responsibility building products for the firm such that in 10 years time, a new joiner to the firm, their friends say to them, 'Oh my goodness you can handle that much reasoning?'" he said.
"I think that has to be a proactive choice to think about how do we empower human reasoning, not delegate it."
What the warning means for HR teams
For HR professionals, the issue is no longer hypothetical. As organizations roll out AI tools across departments, skills erosion is becoming a measurable talent risk. Employees who lean heavily on AI for drafting, analysis, and decision-making may sharpen their output now while gradually losing the underpinning judgment needed to review that work.
The challenge for HR is structural, not just cultural. Policies that define when AI can replace tasks - and when employees must do the reasoning themselves - need to be part of onboarding, performance reviews, and continuing development. Without those guardrails, the workforce may become efficient in the short term but less capable over time.
That makes AI training a workforce development issue. AI for Human Resources is one area where teams are addressing the consequences of heavy AI reliance in daily workflows, from how to select appropriate tools to how to design roles that protect human capability. HR leaders who pair AI adoption with deliberate AI Self-Improvement efforts are better positioned to avoid the cognitive decline that concerns industry leaders.
Why this matters for HR professionals
The practical task for HR teams is to define how their organizations use AI without letting it erode the reasoning skills that drive quality work. That means designing job descriptions that make thinking visible, setting AI training standards that require understanding and review, and building performance metrics that reward judgment rather than mere output speed.
The leaders who get this balance right, as Churchman's comments suggest, will be the ones who create workplaces where ten years from now, employees are still doing their own reasoning - assisted by AI, not replaced by it.
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