A survey released Wednesday morning by workplace research and media company Charter found that executives are about twice as likely as rank-and-file workers to say they trust artificial intelligence (AI) more than their own judgment.
The numbers
According to the Charter survey, 32.8% of executives reported trusting AI more than their own judgment. By comparison, 16.3% of individual contributors (rank-and-file workers) said the same. Managers fell in between, with 34.8% reporting greater trust in AI than in their own judgment.
Charter conducted the survey in August of 5,002 U.S. office workers at companies with at least 100 employees who said they use AI at work. The sample included 2,952 individual contributors, 1,547 managers and 503 executives; the executives group comprised vice presidents, C-suite executives, owners and founders.
Why it matters
The report's authors describe the trend as "cognitive offloading," meaning people use tools such as AI to reduce mental effort. They warn that it is concerning when the most experienced people in organizations — executives — rely on AI more than their own judgment, because leadership decisions have broad consequences across companies.
Brian Elliott, a coauthor of the report, former Slack executive and now executive-in-residence at Charter, said executives face heavy pressure to provide quick answers, and AI can help in the short term. "AI lends itself very well to the 'seldom wrong, never in doubt' tendency that some executives have," he said. "If you feel like you have to fake it until you make it as an executive, then AI is certainly going to feed those tendencies because you can appear to be really smart, really quick."
Elliott gave examples from the tech world where executives use AI to produce product prototypes over a weekend and then expect teams to convert those into functioning products without appreciating the more complex work involved. He noted that "AI is really good at giving you the executive summary. It's not necessarily as good at giving you the very specific answer to the problem you've got today, which is more often what an individual contributor faces."
Limits of the survey and other findings
The Charter survey measures executives' self-reported trust in AI, not whether they actually follow AI advice when making consequential decisions. Overall, the report was positive about AI's workplace potential: 42.7% of AI users said it improved both their work and personal lives.
The researchers also highlighted a key tension for employees revealed in separate qualitative interviews with 91 workers: as employees become more skilled with AI, they increasingly see how much work can be done without them, creating a persistent sense of threat about job displacement.
Elliott noted that most executives do not share that same vulnerability: "The odds that an AI CEO shows up and takes over a company are excruciatingly low."
Conclusion
Charter's data show a meaningful divide in trust toward AI across organizational levels. While many workers find AI beneficial, the higher propensity among managers and executives to defer to AI rather than their own judgment raises concerns about decision-making quality and the broader effects when leaders outsource cognitive tasks to algorithms.
