When AI becomes a default advisor, two things can happen at the same time: decisions get faster, and accountability gets thinner.
The failure mode no one talks about
The most common failure mode is quiet. Teams stop thinking and start approving. AI generates a recommendation. A human reviews it. The human approves. This looks like oversight. It is often rubber-stamping.
Over time, the human loses the skill to generate the recommendation themselves. Errors become invisible because no one checks the reasoning. Accountability diffuses, and failure becomes "process" rather than ownership.
Decision quality is not about slowing down. It is about keeping humans genuinely in the loop, not just nominally present. The distinction matters because the appearance of oversight is not the same as its substance. A human who could not have produced the recommendation, and cannot explain why it is right, is not overseeing the decision. They are laundering it.
The organisations that preserve decision quality build the discipline back in: they require a human rationale for consequential calls, they keep people practising the judgement the AI is handling, and they treat the reasoning behind a decision as something to be examined rather than assumed. The goal is not to reject the tool. It is to ensure that when the decision matters, a capable human is still doing the deciding.