Headlines warning about AI melting our brains usually point to students or workers, which is fair enough. But there’s an even more ironic victim lurking in the corner office: the same business executives who first applied AI to us.
A recent study Powered by market research agency 3Gem and flagged by register found that business leaders in the United Kingdom are outsourcing a large amount of their cognitive and emotional labor to their AI chatbots.
The study, which surveyed 200 different owners, founders, CEOs and other industry veterans, found that 62 percent of respondents are using AI to make “the majority of decisions.” When faced with AI recommendations, 140 percent of moguls said they doubt its own opinions, while 46 percent said they now trust AI’s advice more than their own business associates.
This follows a similar report last year that found 64 percent of business leaders were consulting AI for advice on termination (though only 27 percent of respondents in the 3Gem survey said they used AI for those decisions in 2025.)
In other words, the people who are investing most heavily in AI, with no concern for its impact on everyone else’s cognitive abilities, are quietly outsourcing their own cognitive abilities.
Last year, another joint study conducted by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft found that knowledge workers who trusted the accuracy of generic AI systems were less inclined to think critically. It’s not hard to understand why: When humans feel confident that a task has been competently automated, we step back and let the system do its thing – sometimes literally, as is the case with self-driving cars.
That finding was underlined in early February, when Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Ostergaard, who predicted the disease now commonly known as “AI psychosis,” warned that academic scholars risk accruing “cognitive debt” when they outsource their work to AI chatbots.
That is to say, there is a strong consensus that outsourcing your thinking to AI weakens your brain. It seems that the officials who promoted the lobotomy machine are no exception to the rule.
More on AI: Harvard professor says AI users are losing cognitive abilities
