The Dunce Cap of AI

At Osiris, our clients ask us often whether they should or shouldn’t use AI.

AI and agentic systems largely carry a dunce cap with them. It is made specifically for you to wear as you hand over the keys of your operation to a machine that cannot think the way you do.

Our position is simple. Your system should work whether AI is there or not, and it should stay operable even when no AI is present. We also consider most agentic systems to be a waste of money, because the token usage is largely flowing to some cloud giant who does not care whether your business succeeds or fails.

So if you find yourself questioning AI’s place in your business, the question you should be asking is this.

When does using AI stop helping me, and start replacing skills I actually need?

There are good reasons to use AI. There are also good reasons not to use it in certain situations. The line between the two is where the whole decision lives.

When to keep the cap off

Don’t use AI to…

Form every opinion for you.
Skip learning the fundamentals.
Stand in as your sole authority.
Avoid effort entirely.

When to put it to work

There are plenty of great reasons to use AI…

Brainstorm ideas.
Get unstuck.
Summarize information.
Learn from different explanations.
Automate repetitive work.
Draft documents that you then edit.
Challenge your assumptions by asking it to argue the other side.

Used well, AI is a tool that sharpens the person holding it. Used poorly, it quietly takes over the parts of the work that made you good at it in the first place. The difference is whether you stay the one doing the thinking.

Don’t let the big AI in the sky do your thinking for you.