Beware of The AI Illusion: Looking Capable Isn’t Being Capable - A Warning for Individuals and Teams

AI can help polish individual, or a team’s efforts in the workplace, but it can’t replace real capability and balance.  Be careful not to let AI make you or your teams look more capable than you really are as under pressure it can all unravel.

As artificial intelligence weaves itself into our daily work, there's a growing risk that we don’t talk about enough: the illusion of capability it can create around people and teams.

With just a few clicks, AI can help us look more polished, sound more creative, and appear far more adaptable than we might actually be in reality. It's tempting—why not use every tool available to shine? But this ease of enhancement can dangerously blur the line between genuine skill and artificial algorithmic polish.

In teams and organisations, this can quietly breed overconfidence that we ignore at our peril. Individuals may begin to believe they’re more competent than they are. Leaders might overestimate their team’s readiness to tackle complex challenges. Everyone starts operating from a false baseline—and that’s a dangerous place to be, especially in today’s increasingly volatile, uncertain, and risky environments.

What’s safer—and ultimately more effective—is developing a clear understanding of who we actually are: our real behavioural strengths, our limitations, and the way we operate together. This is where sophisticated evidence-based tools and experiential learning becomes crucial. Put people in scenarios where there is not the AI safety net, and where actual strengths and weaknesses become evident. 

It gives us grounded, lived insight into how we behave under pressure, how we relate to others, and how we contribute to a collective outcome without an AI safety net—not how an AI-enhanced version of ourselves might shine.

Tools like the Belbin Team Role model and its reports can play a powerful role here. Belbin’s reports don’t just show us what we’d like to be good at, or what AI makes us look like we are good at—they reflect patterns of observed behaviour over time, often validated by those who work closely with us. This creates a realistic, nuanced view of team dynamics and individual contribution. It encourages honest conversations and better decision-making, because the team isn’t building on illusion—it’s building on reality.

In a world that rewards adaptability and creativity, it’s easy to chase the appearance of those traits instead of developing them in earnest. But short-term polish and AI enhanced capability won’t hold up under long-term pressure. The best individuals and teams are not the ones that look flawless on paper, but the ones that actually know themselves and each other deeply—flaws and all—and know how to work with what’s actually there.

In the end, the safer, wiser path is not to mask our weaknesses, but to understand and manage them—together.  AI is a great tool, we just have to be careful we don’t start to believe all of the illusions of individual and team capability that it can create.