AI and Cognitive Sovereignty: The Urgency of a Threatened Focus

Cognitive Sovereignty in the Digital Age

In a world where screen usage is ubiquitous, deep attention and critical thinking have become essential skills for organizations and nations. A study conducted in 2024 by IPSOS for the National Book Centre revealed that young people aged 16 to 19 spend more than five hours a day in front of screens. At the same time, the massive introduction of generative AI in businesses is radically changing the conditions of intellectual work. This conjunction of phenomena raises a crucial question: the ability to concentrate, long considered a given, is now the hidden foundation of any distinctive managerial skill. If this ability collapses, it is not merely a matter of pedagogy or public health, but fundamentally of cognitive sovereignty.

Documented Decline in Attention

The evidence of this degradation is abundant. Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, found that our ability to stay focused on a single task has dropped from two minutes and thirty seconds to forty seconds over twenty years. Bruno Patino, in his book Tempête dans le bocal, emphasizes that a smartphone user receives an average of 46 notifications per day and spends two hours and thirty minutes on major platforms. Captology, which uses neuroscience to design applications aimed at capturing attention, is not a conspiracy but rather a pragmatic utility. Michel Desmurget, a cognitive neuroscience researcher, has compiled over 2,000 bibliographic references showing cognitive, linguistic, and attentional deficits among young people, contradicting the notion of a digitally native generation that is naturally more agile. These data do not describe a marginal pathology but rather a structural change in the conditions of thought.

The Impact of Generative AI on Cognition

In this context, generative AI is taking hold. A 2024 study published in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education by Zhang and colleagues shows that dependence on generative AI tools among students leads to a decline in creativity and critical reasoning, as well as an increase in cognitive laziness. The mechanism is clear: the more the tool takes over the formulation, organization, and conclusion of reasoning, the less the user retains the faculties necessary to evaluate the outcome. The distinction is crucial. Augmentative use requires solid personal reflection, enriched by the tool. Substitutive use delegates to the machine what one no longer wishes to produce oneself. This substitutive use finds fertile ground among new generations, already weakened by two decades of attention economy. This combination of prior fragility and delegating power must raise alarms.

Concentration as a Strategic Asset for Organizations

Chayma Drira from the Montaigne Institute proposed a crucial shift in perspective in April 2026: capturing the attention of young people is a matter of defense. She advocates for the introduction of a new category in law, "algorithmic time," distinct from tool time and chosen leisure time. What is at stake is the ability of a generation to form the judgment necessary for the future exercise of citizenship. The paradox is striking: while AI automates information processing, the economic value of high-level cognitive skills is increasing, even as the contemporary digital condition erodes them.

Higher education institutions and businesses must recognize this new reality and integrate explicit mechanisms into their curricula and professional pathways to train attention:

• personal diagnostics
• neurocognitive inputs
• deep reading exercises
• reasoned comparison of human and AI-assisted productions

Deep concentration is no longer transmitted by default. It must now be taught.

An Institutional Necessity

The current period demands institutional clarity. Higher education institutions and businesses can no longer ignore the necessity of an articulated attention strategy. This is not merely a question of digital hygiene or workplace well-being, but a structural condition for individual and collective performance in an economy where artificial intelligence is omnipresent. Cognitive sovereignty is not a slogan: it is the last skill to defend. In the face of strategies and algorithms adapted by social media platforms according to countries and their impact on youth, it must also become a political priority for every nation.