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Thinking with AI is a strategizing capability — a deliberate, developable capability with its own internal architecture — operating at a structurally distinct level of human agency. The level is real in the same sense that managing a product portfolio or running a company is real: it produces phenomena the level below does not, has its own dominant dynamics, and requires its own kind of practice. What makes it new is not that humans now use tools to think. Writers used writing. Bookkeepers used double-entry bookkeeping. The spreadsheet did the same work for a generation of analysts. What makes AI different is the point at which it enters the cognitive process. The spreadsheet receives a model the user has already built. The calculator receives an operation the user has already framed. AI participates earlier — at the construction of the frame itself, proposing alternatives the strategist had not generated, surfacing patterns the strategist would not have surfaced, extending the range of framings beyond the strategist's habitual reach.
This earlier participation is what makes the level genuinely new. And it is what makes the capability the level demands not something that develops through use alone. Hours with the interface produce familiarity. Deliberate practice — focused work on the specific judgments that distinguish strategists who keep their thinking anchored from those who drift into surrender — produces the capability. The strategists who build it now, on the most powerful cognitive tool yet developed, are joining a lineage older than any of its tools.
The full piece — Thinking with AI Is a New Level of Human Agency in Its Own Right — argues why this level is structurally real, how the underlying behavioral theory makes the case, and what the six specific actions of strategizing at this level look like.
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