The Problem With Measuring Usage
Shopify tied AI adoption to performance reviews. Microsoft and Google have done versions of the same. The metric everyone can measure is whether engineers are using the tools. The metric nobody has cracked is whether those engineers are still getting better at thinking.
Pattern recognition is how engineers develop judgement. You see a problem, you work through it, you build a mental model. When AI handles the pattern recognition, the work gets done faster. The mental model may not form at all.
This does not show up in sprint velocity or code review counts. It tends to show up in architectural decisions, three years later, that seemed reasonable at the time.
What Most AI Training programs Skip
Most AI training for engineering teams covers prompting, tool integration, and workflow acceleration. That is useful. It is also about half the picture.
The half that gets skipped is what changes in a person's thinking when they stop doing the hard parts themselves. Not as a philosophical concern. As a practical one, with consequences for the decisions those people make when AI gives them a confident, coherent, wrong answer.
organizations are very good right now at getting engineers to use AI. They are less good at making sure those engineers can tell when it should not be trusted.
What Steve Covers
Steve speaks to technical audiences on one specific topic: what AI dependency does to engineering judgement, and what organizations can do about it without slowing teams down or restricting tool use.
He covers how cognitive offloading works, where it helps, and where it quietly degrades the skills engineers need most. The talk draws on cognitive science research and his own experience working inside software organizations.
The audience walks away with a concrete framework for thinking about AI reliance, not a set of restrictions. The goal is engineers who use AI well, which requires understanding what it does to how they think.
Topics for Technology audiences
Steve speaks to technology organizations on the following topics. Each can be delivered as a keynote, half-day workshop, or executive briefing.
- Angles AI Can't Find
- Editors of Intention
- The Judgment Economy
Who books Steve
CTOs, engineering VPs, L&D teams at software companies, conference organisers for tech industry events.
If you are planning an event and want to discuss whether Steve's work is a good fit, the fastest route is a short conversation. No pitch deck required.