Prodigy "Plus": Beware of "Cognitive Offloading" When Using AI

Prodigy debuts "Plus" AI Chat at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity June 16-19, 2025.

For the many speaker sessions I attended last week in Cannes, I took handwritten notes in my Moleskin notebook - a decades old habit as a former English major. Interestingly, I didn't see another such notetaker the entire week - and wondered if this old school habit was something that could be replaced by a tech application. 

An article I read on the flight home from the Wall Street Journal entitled "AI's Biggest Threat: Young People Who Can't Think" forever changed my mind:

"The brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised, stimulated and challenged to grow stronger. Technology and especially AI can stunt this development by doing the mental work that builds the brain's version of a computer cloud - a phenomenon called "cognitive offloading."

At Cannes we debuted our Prodigy "Plus" AI Chat capability, where the subject of how to best employ Artificial Intelligence was a central issue.  Microsoft emphasized using AI as a "Co-Pilot" with the human being the pilot and Mastercard encouraged using AI as "Augmented Intelligence" - sentiments we agree with for our product. The article continued:

"Growing research shows that handwriting engages parts of your brain that play a crucial role in learning...Taking notes by hand also promotes memory development by forcing you to synthesize and prioritize information. Whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity."

"Workers will need to be able to use AI and they will need to come up with novel ideas about how to deploy it to solve problems. They will need to develop AI models, then probe and understand their limitations. All of this will require a higher level of cognition."

Finding the balance and training our brains to adapt to the use of AI tools is something we're building into our "Plus" Playbook with our clients. 

Stay tuned for real-life examples in the months ahead...Carpe Diem! 

Read the full WSJ article at https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-biggest-ai-threat-young-people-who-cant-think-303be1cd?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1