Outsourcing ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images

Seems this is what's happening with CEOs and not just the unwashed ...

To whit.

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.

When thinking about this, the outsourcing of one's brains to AI applies not only with the boffins of AI but also with government, big business and the art of war because ignoring the tenets of The Mythical Man Month is foolish at best as doing anything of consequence takes effort and in-depth understanding needed to solve the problem at hand.

As proof ...

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

When n people have to communicate among themselves, as n increases,
their output decreases and when it becomes negative the project is delayed
further with every person added.

Group intercommunication formula: n(n − 1)/2.

Example: 50 developers give 50 × (50 – 1)/2 = 1,225 channels of communication.

Any questions?