What AI Assistants Are Doing to Your Team's Attention
Always-on AI assistants shipped into Word, Excel, Slack, and the desktop in a single fortnight, while peer-reviewed cognitive science is converging on a quieter finding: AI co-use makes workers feel sharper and faster while metacognitive accuracy and durable knowledge silently slip.
TLDR In a single fortnight, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic shipped always-on AI agents into the apps a team works in, and Accenture turned on Copilot for 743,000 employees. Meanwhile, peer-reviewed cognitive-science research from Wharton, Aalto, and Microsoft itself is converging on a quieter finding: AI co-use makes workers feel sharper and faster while metacognitive accuracy and durable knowledge silently slip. The speed shows up this quarter. The gap shows up later. What I’m seeing I keep getting the same call from Heads of People and Heads of Engineering this month. The dashboards look great. Adoption is climbing. The leadership all-hands had a Copilot demo and the room laughed in the right places. And then, very quietly, the same person says: “I think the work coming out of my team is also getting blander, and I cannot tell if I am imagining it.” That instinct is not paranoid. It is showing up in the literature. In the same two weeks Accenture announced one of the largest enterprise AI deployments on record, three peer-reviewed studies from cognitive psychology, learning science, and human-computer interaction landed on the same uncomfortable point. The thing that AI assistants change first is not output. It is how well people can tell what they actually know. This piece walks through both currents. The shipping side. The cognition side. And the pattern I think Leaders should hold in mind when the next quarterly business review goes well and something still feels off. The AI side In the past fortnight, all three frontier vendors shipped the same architectural shift. Microsoft moved Copilot’s agentic capabilities to general availability in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on April 22. OpenAI launched Workspace Agents in ChatGPT the same day, with native plumbing into Slack, Salesforce, and Google Workspace, and crucially, agents that keep running after the browser closes. Anthropic moved Claude Cowork into general availability earlier in April with desktop-level co