A few days ago I came across a short video from Helen Edwards at the Artificiality Institute. She was summarizing research on cognitive sovereignty, defined as the degree to which you remain the author of your own thinking, and the finding stopped me.
According to their study, the people with the highest cognitive sovereignty scores were not the ones using AI the least. They were the ones using it the most: fully integrated, identity reorganized around AI and maximum engagement on every dimension measured. The researchers call them co-authors and I think it fits.
The lowest scores belong to those who kept AI at arm’s length and delegated work to it. Outsourcers.
I watched it expecting to find something that would challenge what I’d been feeling, namely that AI is augmenting me, not taking away from me. Instead, I found the beginning of an explanation to what I had been feeling.
Why this makes sense to me
My colleague Pascal Hamel likes to say “AI is only as good as your ability to tell it precisely what to do” and he’s right. An LLM is not a thinking machine. It’s a prediction machine. It predicts the most likely next word in a sentence, at enormous scale, over vast training data. Someone, and I beat myself up for not remembering where I saw this, framed it well: AI doesn’t write good code, it writes probable code. Why it matters? Because AI is not thinking outside the box, by definition and training it thinks inside the box.
When you engage deeply with AI, you learn exactly that. You learn what it does well and where it falls short. You develop a sense for when its output is just statistically average and when it’s actually useful. You bring the judgment it cannot have.
When you delegate to it, you never develop that sense. The box becomes invisible because you’re never inside the process. Don’t get me wrong, delegation is fantastic for some things, but not all things.
Think about how the best developers use AI coding tools. They don’t just prompt and accept. They architect the harness: context files, rules, test suites, feedback loops that shape what the agent can produce. The harness is human judgment made explicit and persistent. You can’t architect a good one if you’ve checked out of the process, which brings us back to the same variable: are you inside it or outside it and did you choose your position deliberately or by happenstance.
The three things worth protecting
The research also frames cognitive sovereignty around three components and as far as I’m concerned, all three are under pressure.
Awareness is the first to go when you’re moving fast. It’s easy to pawn off the work and reclaim a few minutes, or a few hours, but awareness is how you stay calibrated. When you stop noticing what AI gets wrong, you also stop noticing what you’re no longer contributing.
Agency is the balancing act. A fully autonomous agent maximizes throughput and minimizes your involvement. That’s useful in places, but it’s worth asking, for each workflow where human judgment would create value? The answer is rarely nowhere.
Accountability is the one I find easiest to hold. Everything I produce with AI is my work, full stop. I understand the pull toward the opposite when you’re under pressure, when AI was introduced into your process without much say, when you’re delivering against a deadline. The more engaged you are, the harder it becomes to disown the output.
What this means if you lead people
The outsourcer profile is not rare. It shows up as the person who treats AI as magic, who believes it will replace everything quickly by automating every function and make human input redundant. What I believe they fail to take into account is the value of human judgment and where it fits. Perhaps they skipped the hard work of staying inside the process?
Not everything gains from having a human in the loop. Summarizing the newsletters I skim each day? Delegated freely. For the work that carries judgment, the question for leaders is not whether to adopt AI or not, it is how to build teams that stay inside the process, because that is what separates a passing grade from an outstanding one.
So yes, in that sense, cognitive sovereignty doesn’t come from using AI less. It comes from using it with your eyes open but that does not mean co-authors are the golden standard, there is a trap lying in wait for them. As we get better and more fluent using AI, we must not stop questioning what the process is yielding or we risk losing the critical distance that forced us to get better in the first place.