Every vendor pitch this year opens the same way: AI will make your sales team faster, smarter, more efficient. They're not wrong. But they're leaving out the part where AI might also be making your reps worse at the thing that actually closes deals—thinking.

Here's the problem no one's talking about at your AI kickoff meeting: cognitive offloading.

Peak season is here. Most retail and ecommerce teams face the same problem: volume spikes, but headcount doesn't.

Instead of hiring temporary staff or burning out your team, there’s a smarter move. Let AI handle the predictable stuff, like answering FAQs, routing tickets, and processing returns, so your people focus on what they do best: building loyalty.

Gladly’s ROI calculator shows exactly what this looks like for your business: how many tickets AI could resolve, how much that costs, and what that means for your bottom line. Real numbers. Your data.

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It's a term from cognitive science that describes what happens when we shift mental tasks to external tools. Your phone remembers phone numbers so you don't have to. GPS navigates so you never build a mental map. And now, AI writes emails, summarizes calls, and suggests next steps so your reps don't have to engage their own judgment.

Convenient? Absolutely. Dangerous? More than most enablement leaders realize.

Nahla Davies, writing in Training Magazine, puts it bluntly: AI tools can weaken critical thinking and problem-solving skills over time. Not because the tools are bad—but because of HOW we train people to use them.

Here's the thing. When reps start defaulting to AI for tasks they used to think through themselves, they're not just saving time. They're atrophying the muscle that helps them read a room, challenge a prospect's assumptions, or know when the "perfect" AI-generated response is actually wrong for this specific deal.

I've watched this pattern across organizations implementing AI tools. The rollout focuses on functionality—here's how to prompt it, here's where the button is, here's the integration with your CRM. What's missing? Training reps to know when to use it, when to override it, and when to think for themselves.

The tools aren't the problem. The training gap is.