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Organisations are at risk of losing critical resources, such as practical wisdom and know-how, as managers become more reliant on artificial intelligence, new research warns.

In work environments characterised by time pressure to complete tasks promptly, managers may be "cognitively de-skilling" by offloading tasks to AI, University of Bath Professor Dirk Lindebaum tells HR Daily.

For their paper published in the Academy of Management Review, Lindebaum and his fellow researchers analysed how AI use affects what they refer to as "managerial phronesis", being the practical wisdom that managers develop through first-hand experience.

"For one thing, the synthetic and codified nature of GenAI outputs may reduce a manager's agency to develop useful and usable knowledge," because it inserts "distance" between managers and those experiences, they say...