Distributed Cognition: The Real AI Revolution You’re Missing
- Rich Washburn
- Apr 12
- 3 min read
Let me tell you a weird story: we don’t know how to build the Space Shuttle anymore.
Seriously. NASA built the Shuttle with some of the best engineers the world has ever seen. But the knowledge didn’t just live in documents or blueprints—it lived in teams. In relationships. In unspoken workflows. When those teams disbanded, a lot of that knowledge vanished. Not because it wasn’t written down. Because it wasn’t shared between minds the way it used to be.
Now here's the twist: the same thing is happening again, but with artificial intelligence.
AI is showing up in our workflows, sure—but it’s coming in through the back door. Quietly. Privately. As individuals, we’re using tools like ChatGPT to write better emails, analyze strategy decks, draft proposals, clean up code. But we’re doing it alone. And that’s a mistake.
Why?
Because teams are the real engines of innovation. And right now, we’re pretending AI is just a personal productivity tool. In reality, it’s something much bigger: a potential teammate. A force multiplier. A living, breathing part of our group cognition.
We’re Using AI Like It’s Ours. But It Should Be Ours.
Think about the way you use AI right now. You’ve got your prompts. Your secret sauce. Maybe you’ve spent hours refining them. Maybe you’ve got a few saved in a doc somewhere. But how often do you share those with your team? How often does your team align around a shared AI process?
In most orgs, the answer is: never. Worse—people often feel like they have to hide their AI usage. Like it’s cheating. Like it’s not “real” work.
That mindset? It’s killing potential.
Because here’s the real headline: AI isn’t just smart. It’s social. When you plug it into the middle of a great team, it becomes part of the connective tissue. A new layer of distributed cognition that boosts everyone—not just the person at the keyboard.
AI as a Team Sport: What That Actually Looks Like
Let’s break this down. If you want to turn AI into a team capability—not just a solo act—here’s where to start:
1. Shared Prompt Libraries
Create a central place where your team can drop and remix great prompts.Your sales team has templates. Your marketing team has brand guidelines. Your AI team (a.k.a. everyone) should have prompt recipes.
2. Context Banks
Every AI is only as good as the context you feed it. Build shared knowledge hubs—company voice, customer segments, playbooks, core values—so AI can think like your team.
3. AI Retros
Start asking in your standups: “What did AI help you with this week?”This normalizes usage. Sparks ideas. Builds momentum. AI should be a part of your team rituals—not just your browser history.
4. Team-level Training
Don’t just teach individuals to use AI. Teach teams how to co-create with it. How to divide tasks. How to hand off work. How to let the AI coordinate the little things while the humans tackle the big ones.
This Is About More Than Efficiency. It’s About Evolution.
We’ve spent 200,000 years doing our thinking inside our skulls. A few hundred years ago, we started writing it down. Now, for the first time, we’re putting pieces of our thinking into the machine—and letting it reason with us, for us, alongside us.
It’s not weird. It’s the natural next step.But it only works if we stop thinking about AI as a tool and start treating it like what it’s becoming: an amplifier for collective intelligence.
If we want to build big things—shuttles, systems, strategies—we need to do it together. AI doesn’t replace the team. It extends it.
And that? That’s where the real revolution lives.
#AIForTeams, #FutureOfWork, #CollaborativeAI, #TeamProductivity, #PromptSharing, #DigitalTransformation, #AITools, #WorkplaceInnovation, #HumanAI, #AIEmpowerment
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