New research synthesis from Brooklyn-based AI advisory firm reveals a negative correlation between AI use and critical thinking ability among business leaders.
NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, March 19, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — As businesses accelerate AI adoption across every function, a growing body of peer-reviewed research suggests the technology may be quietly degrading the very skill leaders need most: independent judgment.
Mindmaker, a Brooklyn-based AI advisory firm specializing in 1:1 decision sprints for senior executives, has published a synthesis of recent studies that paints a concerning picture of AI’s cognitive side effects on business leadership.
A joint study from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft found that individuals who lack domain expertise accept AI-generated suggestions without critical evaluation. Separately, a Swiss Business School study led by Dr. Michael Gerlich identified a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and measurable critical thinking ability. Research conducted jointly by MIT and OpenAI documented prolonged AI use correlating with dependency behaviors, anxiety when the tool is unavailable, and a measurable decline in independent reasoning capacity.
Additional findings compound the concern. Columbia Journalism Review reported that AI-powered search engines produce hallucinated content with high confidence 60% of the time. University of Illinois researchers demonstrated that large language models fail on novel, slightly modified problems 70% of the time. OpenAI’s own internal testing revealed that newer, more powerful models hallucinate at higher rates than their predecessors, not lower.
“Everyone is panicking about the wrong thing,” said Krish Raja, Founder of Mindmaker and a 30 Under 30 AI product builder who also runs AI advisory for enterprises. “The headlines keep screaming about AI taking jobs. But the actual threat walked in the back door while nobody was looking. It’s not the job. It’s the judgment. The more leaders delegate thinking to machines, the worse they get at the one thing machines can’t do for them.”
Raja founded Mindmaker after observing a recurring pattern across industries: leaders drowning in AI vendor pitches while actively avoiding the high-stakes decisions that determine whether AI helps or harms their organizations.
“I keep meeting leaders who have adopted 14 AI tools and made zero AI decisions,” Raja said. “Tools are easy. Thinking is hard. And the gap between the two is where careers and companies go to die.”
The firm’s approach centers on what it calls the Mind Set, Mind Map, Mind Make framework, a three-phase sprint structure designed around real-world decision-making rather than training or vendor demonstrations. Mind Set focuses on clarity, helping leaders cut through noise to identify the two or three decisions that genuinely matter. Mind Map builds leverage through working systems integrated into actual workflows. Mind Make drives direction through measurement, documentation, and board-ready roadmaps.
Mindmaker serves two categories of senior leader through its invite-only sprint program. Builders are operational leaders who need to become productive AI practitioners before leading their teams through adoption. Orchestrators are senior executives who remain hands-off technically but face million-dollar decisions about AI investment, governance, and vendor commitments. Both arrive with unresolved anxiety about AI and leave with defensible, board-ready decisions.
The company’s private platform for leaders goes beyond conventional advisory. It converts voice notes into privatized memory webs that executives carry with them to systematically improve their own AI usage. The platform is trained on five cognitive frameworks drawn from behavioral economics and decision science: A/B Framing, Dialectical Reasoning, Mental Contrasting, Reflective Equilibrium, and First-Principles Thinking. Each framework is designed to sharpen human judgment rather than replace it.
“Speed is not strategy. Autonomy is not intelligence,” Raja said. “When everything moves faster, the margin for error shrinks. Every bad decision compounds quicker. Every unexamined assumption scales further. Attention to detail just became the most valuable skill in business, and almost nobody is building for it. The leaders who win will not be the ones who adopted AI fastest. They will be the ones who thought hardest about what to do with it.”
For more information, visit themindmaker.ai.
Krish Raja
Mindmaker
+1 347-665-8225
krish@themindmaker.ai
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