Around 80% of larger workplaces globally have implemented GenAI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. With such a hefty investment, their focus now is on getting people to use them. One of the big challenges, however, is that it doesn’t just work to “mandate” this usage. People need to make the choice to use them, and as well, they need to learn how to use them effectively.
There are three key challenges to this goal. But the good news is, there is also a clear direction that helps solve all three challenges at once: learning about the brain.
3 Obstacles to Widespread, Effective AI Use
The first challenge is people are experiencing strong negative reactions to these tools. A Fast Company post recently suggested that as high as a third of employees were actively sabotaging their firm’s AI strategy.
From a neuroscience perspective, it’s easy to understand why people are reacting this way. There are five experiences in life that each activate warning signals in the brain: threats to our sense of status, our sense of certainty, our autonomy, our relatedness (or belonging in the group), and our sense of fairness. AI is putting each of these into red alert, creating a threat response even greater than the sum of its parts and preventing change management from taking root.
The second challenge to healthy AI adoption involves a skill that is not widely evolved in the average employee today: metacognition, or simply, thinking about thinking. Many strands of research are pointing to this capacity as being central to using AI to get smarter, across being more creative, making better decisions, and being more effective.
While there has not yet been a formal study directly focused on metacognitive skills in employees, research suggests that less than 25% of a population display high levels of or well developed metacognitive abilities.
This means that the majority of employees today are likely to accept whatever output an AI tool will give them, without reflecting, checking for relevance, quality, bias, or hallucination. For AI adoption to work, we need a way to build the capacity for metacognition at massive scale, across industries and roles.
The third challenge relates to the impact of less-healthy use of AI tools – relying on or ‘offloading’ to AI. Many of us are offloading a lot of our day to day activities, like email communications, and in the process, rapidly losing the capacity to undertake these tasks on our own. In fact, research has revealed an alarming number of AI-reliance- “side effects”, including a reduction in critical thinking, learning abilities, and memory, not to mention increasing the likelihood of toxic work cultures. This points to the need to develop a robust set of habits for healthy partnering with AI tools, that will help people, amongst other things, identify the kinds of skills they are ok to let atrophy, and the ones they want to sustain. In short, we need people everywhere to be better at partnering with AI in ways that make them better at their jobs, not worse.
Fortunately, it turns out there is a pathway to addressing all three of these issues at once, which involves teaching people about their brain.
The Performance-Improving Power of “Neuro Intelligence”
Within the past decade, growing evidence has shown that when people learn about how the brain works, this knowledge impacts the very thought processes and attitudes that they have about their own lives. This is similar to how emotional intelligence (EQ) grew in popularity two decades ago, when EQ suddenly joined IQ as a relevant skill in life and the workplace.
For instance, teaching people about the brain profoundly affects how they manage their thoughts, feelings, and self-beliefs. According to neuroscientist Golnaz Tabibnia, neuroeducation (which is what she called the act of building neurointelligence) helps people respond to challenging circumstances more positively, less negatively, and even transcend their base sense of self. It also lowers people’s resistance to facing fears and increases their self-efficacy, or the belief that they have agency to solve their own problems, improve their skills over time (the hallmarks of growth mindset), show more self-compassion in the face of failure (a key skill involved in resilience) and believe that stress and pain can be managed through deliberate strategies.
When people have greater neurointelligence — or “NQ” — they also have an easier time thinking about their own thinking, or engaging in metacognition. For instance, recognizing that your thought processes impact your decisions or actions will make it easier to actively reflect on your train of thought and decide to stay aboard or disembark whenever you choose. For example, learning about insight leads you to leave space in your mornings, knowing that this is a time when more of them will occur. Or learning about cognitive biases will stop you from blindly accepting every AI-generated recommendation without question. Recognizing that the brain takes cognitive shortcuts leads you to pause, and critically evaluate the output before acting on it.
Lastly, higher NQ should help with a full suite of cognitive processes that enable deeper reflection. These include, but aren’t limited to: understanding and maximizing one’s ability to hold complex ideas in mind, regulate their emotions, practice resilience, stay motivated, make unbiased decisions, and effect change in oneself and others. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen these benefits firsthand in working with over 60% of Fortune 100 companies to strengthen millions of people’s understanding of the human brain. Time and again, when people become smarter about their own minds, just about every aspect of their thoughts, emotions, relationships, and performances improves.
AI doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. If we want to use it well, and empower others to reap the same benefits, we should be prepared to get well-acquainted with the ancient technology we’ve been carrying with us all along.
