The headlines warning about AI melting our brains usually point to students or workers, which — fair enough. But there’s a much more ironic victim hiding in the corner office: the very business executives who unleashed AI on us in the first place.
A recent study conducted by market research agency 3Gem and flagged by The Register found that business leaders in the United Kingdom seem to be outsourcing a huge amount of their cognitive and emotional labor to their AI chatbots.
The study, which surveyed 200 various owners, founders, CEOs, and other titans of industry, found that 62 percent of the respondents are using AI to make “most decisions.” A whopping 140 of the moguls reported second-guessing their own ideas when they conflicted with AI’s recommendations, while 46 percent said they now rely on advice from AI more than that of their own business colleagues.
This follows a similar report from last year that found 64 percent of business leaders were consulting AI for advice on terminations (although only 27 percent of the respondents to the 3Gem survey said they used AI for those decisions in 2025.)
In other words, the people most loudly investing in AI, with no concern for its impact on everybody else’s cognitive abilities, are quietly outsourcing their own.
Last year, another joint study conducted by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft found that knowledge workers who trusted the accuracy of generative AI systems had a lower propensity for critical thought. It’s not hard to see why: when humans are confident that a task has been competently automated, we tend to take a backseat and let the system do its thing — sometimes literally, as in the case of self-driving cars.
That finding was underscored earlier in February, when Søren Dinesen Østergaard, the Danish psychiatrist who predicted the affliction now commonly known as “AI psychosis,” warned that academic scholars risk accruing a “cognitive debt” when they outsource their work to AI chatbots.
All that is to say, there’s a strong consensus that outsourcing your thinking to AI atrophies your brain. The executives who evangelized the lobotomy machine, it seems, are no exception to the rule.
More on AI: Harvard Professor Says AI Users Are Losing Cognitive Abilities