Headlines warning that AI will melt our brains usually refer to students and workers, and rightly so. But a far more cynical victim is hiding in the corner office. It’s the very business leaders who unleashed AI on us in the first place.
A recent study conducted by market research firm 3Gem reported: register We found that UK business leaders appear to be outsourcing a huge amount of cognitive and emotional labor to AI chatbots.
The study surveyed 200 diverse owners, founders, CEOs, and other industry giants and found that 62 percent of respondents use AI for “most decisions.” A whopping 140 moguls reported putting their thoughts on the back burner when they conflict with AI recommendations, and 46% said they now rely on advice from AI more than that of their business colleagues.
This follows a similar report from last year that found 64 per cent of business leaders consulted AI for redundancy advice (although only 27 per cent of 3Gem survey respondents said they used AI to make redundancy decisions in 2025).
In other words, the people who are most vocal about investing in AI are silently outsourcing their own cognitive abilities, without caring about the impact AI will have on everyone else’s cognitive abilities.
Another joint study conducted last year by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft found that knowledge workers who trust the accuracy of generative AI systems are less likely to think critically. It’s not difficult to understand why. When humans are confident that a task has been properly automated, they tend to take a backseat and let the system do its thing. Sometimes it’s literal, as in the case of self-driving cars.
This finding was highlighted in early February when Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard, who predicted what is now commonly known as ‘AI psychosis’, warned that academics risked incurring ‘cognitive debt’ if they outsourced their work to AI chatbots.
In other words, there is a strong consensus that outsourcing your thinking to AI will shrink your brain. It seems that the executives who promoted the spread of lobotomy surgery are no exception.
Learn more about AI: Harvard professor says AI users are losing cognitive abilities
