The Book
Thinking with AI
The Leadership Discipline for the Age of AI. Out now in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle.
Using AI and thinking with AI are not the same thing.
Most of what has been written about AI and leadership is about adoption. Which tools, how fast, what it costs, who gets trained first. That conversation matters and it is also the easy half. The harder half is what happens to the people doing the work once the machine is good enough that nobody has to think very hard, and the answer arrives before the question is fully formed.
Capability is not a possession that lasts once acquired. It is a practice, and practices decay. A leader who stops interrogating the answer stops being able to tell a good one from a plausible one, and the loss is invisible right up until the day it is expensive. This book is about the discipline that prevents that: what to keep practicing, what to hand over, and how to tell the difference under real pressure.
It draws on 35 years of building and running technology organizations, and on the specific experience of watching a region lose its capability once already.
Details
| Publisher | Palmetto Publishing |
| Published | September 22, 2026 |
| Length | 214 pages |
| Hardcover | ISBN 9798318850349 |
| Paperback | ISBN 9798318850356 |
| eBook | ISBN 9798318850363 |
The real danger with AI is not what it does. It is what it lets you not do.
Srini KoushikInside
The ideas the book is built on.
The Mastery Loop
Think, Do, Learn, Adapt. The motion by which people build mastery, and the one AI makes it easy to step out of.
The Cognitive Rust Belt
What accumulated cognitive atrophy looks like at scale. Not a single failure. A thousand small abdications.
Five durable human capabilities
Conceptual Clarity, Critical Evaluation, Creative Exploration, Constructive Collaboration, Cognitive Agility.
Car and driver
AI is the car. The human is the driver. Most of the confusion about AI and work comes from getting that backwards.
The volition gap
AI Fluency is not a skill gap. People know how. The question is whether they choose to stay in the work.
The Automation Trap
Speeding up a process nobody examined. AI should not accelerate waste. It should make waste visible.
Also by Srini Koushik
IBM Patterns for e-business
A bestseller in its category, written during the years spent building the systems the current book argues about.
iBooks on Digital Business
A series on digital business architecture and operating models.
Booking
The keynote the book came from.
The argument works on a page and it works in a room. Bring it to yours.
Book Srini