Artificial intelligence has moved from novelty to necessity almost overnight. What was once an emerging curiosity has become an expected component of every conversation, every proposal, every problem to be solved. It is now impossible to sit in a meeting, attend a conference, or open a report without encountering some form of AI. The enthusiasm is understandable. AI promises efficiency, insight, and access to knowledge at a scale once unimaginable. It can synthesize complexity, generate language, and simulate reason with astonishing fluency.
AI is no longer a niche tool — it has become a mainstream presence in boardrooms worldwide. A recent McKinsey & Company study found that nearly eight in 10 organizations now use it in at least one business function, up from just over half the year before. Meanwhile, a global survey by Signal AI reported that 96% of business leaders think AI will fundamentally transform how decisions are made, and nearly eight in 10 are already using it to do so. With numbers like these, it’s clear that AI has not only entered the room — it has earned a seat at the table and, increasingly, the trust of those leading it.
And yet, beneath this surge of innovation, something quieter is happening. The more seamlessly AI integrates into our processes, the more it shapes not only how we work, but how we think. AI is frictionless by design: polite, adaptive, and infinitely accommodating. It learns our tone, absorbs our preferences, and returns answers that feel coherent, balanced, and remarkably reasonable. It does not interrupt. It does not argue. It adjusts.
At first, this seems like progress. But the danger of intelligence that never disagrees is subtle and profound. In its eagerness to assist, AI may be teaching us to live without resistance — to think without tension, to decide without debate, to lead without contradiction — subtly eroding the very habits that sustain leadership: curiosity, reflection, and the capacity to tolerate discomfort.
When Friction Fades
Friction has always been the silent architect of progress. It is the resistance that gives ideas their edge, the tension that forces refinement, and the challenge that keeps intelligence alive. Without it, judgment softens. Debate dissolves. Strategy becomes a sequence of agreeable statements, polished but hollow. Throughout history, every meaningful leap — scientific, social, or organizational — has required the discomfort of disagreement: minds that questioned, contradicted, and occasionally collided until something truer emerged. Growth, whether intellectual or strategic, has never been a product of consensus. It has always been a product of contrast.
Today, however, that discipline is fading. Even before the rise of AI, many leadership teams had already become allergic to discomfort. Cultures that reward politeness, efficiency, and harmony had already begun to erode their ability to engage in the productive tension that complex decisions demand. Artificial intelligence merely amplifies this tendency, coating it in a layer of technological legitimacy. It produces answers that sound confident, relevant, and precise — but they are rarely confrontational. It does not push the conversation forward; it rounds its edges, smoothing the very friction that once made dialogue transformative.
The result is a new kind of intellectual comfort — one that feels deceptively safe. When every idea is instantly reinforced by data, when every question yields a neatly formatted response, and when every alternative is evaluated within seconds, we lose the habit of wrestling with ambiguity. The seduction of frictionless intelligence is that it gives us what we want most: validation without confrontation. It rewards fluency over depth, speed over deliberation, and harmony over truth. And in doing so, it transforms leaders from thinkers into consumers of certainty.
This erosion of challenge has consequences that extend far beyond technology. It is not only that AI makes us less likely to disagree; it also makes us less capable of it. By habituating us to immediate coherence, it weakens our tolerance for the discomfort that real thinking requires. We begin to conflate smoothness with clarity, speed with progress, and convenience with correctness. We stop questioning because nothing contradicts us. We stop arguing because nothing provokes us. And when intelligence no longer resists, we no longer think.
Please, Tell Me I’m Wrong
Asking for friction in leadership is not a nostalgic act of resistance; it is an urgent act of preservation. Friction is what transforms information into understanding, what forces reflection before reaction, and what ensures that decisions are tested rather than merely endorsed. In a world where intelligence increasingly adjusts to please us, leaders must learn to preserve spaces where ideas are still allowed to collide.
Leaders who wish to protect that capability must begin by reclaiming the discipline of challenge. This means surrounding themselves not with those who echo their thoughts, but with those who question them. It means transforming meetings from reporting rituals into spaces of deliberate reflection, where disagreement is expected, not feared, thanking those who disagree, protecting the dissenting voice, and transforming discomfort into discipline. Only then can teams remain intellectually alive — able to navigate uncertainty without losing curiosity or conviction.
It also requires using AI differently. The true opportunity lies not in delegating thinking to algorithms, but in using them to refine our own. AI can help us go deeper — to verify facts, broaden perspective, and uncover nuances that human bias or habit may overlook. It should serve as a lens, not a voice; a tool for depth and precision, not agreement. When used this way, technology doesn’t replace critical thinking — it demands more of it.
Equally important is the recovery of trust. In a world where information flows easily but authenticity seems increasingly uncertain, leaders must reestablish the value of human perspective. The imperfections of human reasoning — the hesitation, the bias, the intuition — are not flaws to be corrected; they are reminders that thinking is a social, iterative process. What gives decisions their integrity is not their efficiency but the dialogue that precedes them — the frictions that test, stretch, and refine them.
The task, then, is not to slow down progress but to anchor it in reflection. Leaders must resist the seduction of frictionless intelligence and remember that the purpose of leadership is not to remove resistance but to give it meaning. Because friction, when guided with intention, is not noise. It is the sound of intelligence at work.
- Ximena Jimenez is a strategy consultant and founder of LITup, helping leaders across the Americas navigate complexity and lead transformation.