Your Newest Team Member Isn’t Human

When a new person joins a team, it changes the dynamics. Roles shift. Expectations get renegotiated. Who has authority and who defers to whom gets quietly reshuffled.

AI did something stranger. It joined with capabilities that reach across every function, and a habit of answering before the team has finished thinking. It plugs into marketing one minute, legal the next, then quietly rewrites how decisions get made because the “best available information” is always sitting on the table.

The harder question is what happens to a team when you add a member like that.

One that is endlessly agreeable, often incomplete, and already shaping the work before anyone has examined the assumptions underneath it.

Will AI change every role in the organization? Yes. Will it understand the culture? No. Should you say please and thank you to it? Probably. But that’s a longer conversation.

Curt Steinhorst asks what happens to a group when a good-enough answer is always available before anyone has to think. AI can produce competent output at speed, but it can’t connect unrelated experiences in ways nobody expected, question whether the right problem is even being solved, or push back when the group is converging too fast on a comfortable answer.

That gap is what determines whether AI makes a team smarter or just faster at being wrong.

This body of work draws on fifteen years studying how technology changes human behavior, and a bestselling book on digital distraction that predated the current AI moment by half a decade.