Nearly three-quarters of executives now trust AI's business advice more than that of their own colleagues or friends. A growing number are letting it make the call outright.
A Fortune report citing research from SAP found 74% of executives are more confident in AI-generated advice than in advice from colleagues, and 44% say they'd defer to AI's reasoning over their own.
Thirty-eight percent trust AI to make business decisions for them outright. Sixty-four percent of leaders say generative AI is already fully or partially integrated into how they make executive decisions.
Systems in these large organizations are now so complex, so data-driven, that AI is as capable as the smartest people on the planet of parsing data and coming up with the key options.
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The Risk Isn't Replacement. It's Erosion.
Nobody's worried about AI taking a CEO's job. The real risk is quieter: a leader who gets a fluent, confident-sounding answer from a chatbot and starts trusting it a little more each time, even when nobody's checked whether it's actually right.
Generative AI can still produce information that sounds authoritative and simply isn't true, and unlike a colleague pushing back in a meeting, it never hesitates or qualifies itself. That confidence is exactly what makes it dangerous to lean on for judgment calls rather than data analysis.
Watch for "Work Slop"
There's a useful shorthand for one of the clearest warning signs here: a small prompt goes in, an AI tool produces something long, polished, and confident-sounding, and the person on the receiving end passes it along without actually reading it closely first.
It looks like output. It isn't necessarily thought. The habit compounds fast in any organization, since once it's normal to forward AI work unreviewed, it becomes just as normal to let AI-generated reasoning quietly overrule a human's objection instead of sitting with the disagreement.
What This Means for Your Store
Set actual guardrails before this becomes a habit rather than after: decide as a leadership team how AI-assisted work gets reviewed before it goes out, when it's appropriate to use for a real strategic call versus a first draft, and make sure your team knows their pushback still counts even when it's up against a chatbot's polished answer.
The goal isn't less AI. It's making sure a fluent answer never quietly replaces the harder work of actually checking whether it's right.
