How AI Creates a Capability Mirage
MIT Sloan Management Review, Monday, September 14th, 2026
When polished AI output masks eroding individual skill, teams lose the ability to judge who actually knows what.
Leaders have traditionally judged skill partly through work output, but generative AI now produces fairly polished output for anyone, and an individual's underlying skill set can quietly waste away.
Drawing on a joint Anthrome Insight and Axialent study of AI's impact on behavior and culture inside organizations, the authors report that experts who uniformly cite AI's potential to transform work also warn it risks creating an organizational mirage: workplaces that appear highly capable while real skills erode beneath the AI-generated surface.
The more damaging second-order effect is to trust. When team members can no longer accurately evaluate each other's skills, the interpersonal trust teams depend on to function begins to crumble.