Are You Aware of the Cognitive Challenges AI Is Creating for Your Leaders Every Day?

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You may think we don't fully understand the challenges yet, as AI is still so new. There's no credible long-term research on it, and I'd be wary of anyone who says there is. But when I break down what a leader is actually doing when they work with AI all day, every part of it is something cognitive science already understands well, and some of that research goes back decades.

Most organisations miss these challenges because they don't show in the output. The work still gets done, usually faster. What has changed is the load on the brain doing the checking, the switching and the deciding, and that's where I'd want every HR Director to look.

Picture a senior leader's morning. The first draft of a board paper arrives in thirty seconds, then a summary of a meeting they didn't attend, then three versions of a difficult email. Each one looks finished and each one needs a decision about whether it's right. AI has sped up the writing but the leader still has to judge every piece of it, and so they can face more decisions before lunch than they used to face in a whole day.

Checking AI's work and automation bias

Checking work you didn't write is one of the most demanding things you can ask of working memory. You're holding what the output says and what you know, and looking for the gap between them, and working memory only holds a small amount at once. When it's full, the brain takes the easiest route, which is to accept what's in front of it. Automation research calls this automation bias, and it's been studied for years in cockpits and control rooms. It gets stronger when people are juggling several tasks at once, and that describes most leaders on most days.

Task switching and attention residue

AI has made it quick to move from a meeting to a prompt to an inbox and back, and so leaders now switch far more than they used to. Organisational researcher Sophie Leroy showed that when we move from one task to the next, part of our attention stays on the last one, and performance on the new task drops. She called it attention residue. It's one of the two mechanisms behind Decision Debt, and it's the one leaders are least aware of, because from the inside it just feels like a busy day.

Cognitive offloading and remembering your own thinking

We remember what we work out for ourselves far better than what we read. Psychologists have known this since the 1970s and call it the generation effect. Put that next to cognitive offloading, where the brain stops holding onto information it expects a tool to hold for it, and you get a leader who signs off a strategy paper on Monday and struggles to explain the reasoning behind it on Thursday. The early evidence points the same way. In an MIT Media Lab study, most of the students who wrote essays with ChatGPT couldn't accurately quote from essays they had just written.

Less recovery time between decisions

Drafting used to be slow, and that slowness gave the brain some recovery between one decision and the next. AI has taken most of it away. This is how Decision Debt builds. It's the compounding cost of cognitive depletion and it shows up as safe decisions that quietly kill innovation, because once the thinking that would have challenged the safe option stops happening, nobody has to choose it on purpose for it to win.

This sits at the centre of my AI Resilient Leader keynote. The Evaluate stage of The RESET Framework is about separating signal from noise, and AI produces a lot of very convincing noise. Spotting it depends on a leader's own thinking staying sharp, and after months of approving outputs at speed most leaders won't have noticed that it has slipped.

The changes I'd make first are small. I'd have leaders write down a rough view of their own, even two lines, before they open the tool, and keep AI work to set blocks in the day so they're not dipping in and out of it constantly. And before signing off anything that matters, a short pause, because that's the moment automation bias does its damage.

If your organisation has spent this year rolling out AI tools, the training almost certainly focused on how to use them well. Far fewer organisations are asking what a full day of using them is doing to their leaders' cognitive performance. That's the conversation I have with leadership teams, and if your organisation needs it, email me at neil@neiledgespeaks.com.

Frequently asked questions

What cognitive challenges does AI create for leaders?

Leaders using AI every day check far more work they didn't write and switch between tasks more often, and their decisions come back to back with less recovery in between. Each of these adds to cognitive load, and over time they build Decision Debt.

Is there research on how AI affects the brain?

There's no credible long-term research yet, because AI in daily work is so new. What we do have is decades of research on the mental processes it relies on, including cognitive offloading, automation bias, attention residue and the generation effect. Early studies, such as MIT Media Lab's work on essay writing with ChatGPT, point the same way.

What is automation bias?

Automation bias is the tendency to trust an automated answer and stop looking for what's wrong with it. It's been studied for years in aviation and control rooms, and it gets stronger when people are handling several tasks at once.

What is Decision Debt?

Decision Debt is the compounding cost of cognitive depletion in leaders. It builds through attention residue and continuous cognitive load, and it shows up as safe decisions that quietly kill innovation. I developed The RESET Framework to clear it.

How can organisations reduce the cognitive load AI puts on leaders?

Have leaders form a rough view of their own before opening the tool, and keep AI work to set blocks in the day rather than using it constantly. Then build a short pause in before any important decision is signed off.

About Neil Edge

I'm Neil Edge, a cognitive performance speaker delivering keynotes to senior and emerging leaders across the UK, Europe and internationally. I speak about building the mental architecture leaders need to protect decision quality and maintain high performance when pressure, adversity and AI-driven demand are constant. My signature work is Decision Debt and The RESET Framework. In addition to being a leadership mental performance speaker, I'm also a mental performance coach to professional triathletes.