TL;DR: A growing backlash against the forced adoption of AI is building across the industry, but enterprise executives remain as bullish as ever on the LLM-driven future. According to at least one prominent tech leader, that enthusiasm may signal how out of touch those at the top have become.
Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has coined a name for what he sees afflicting the C-suite: "AI psychosis."
While industry leaders extol the technology as a once-in-a-generation revolution, many of their employees – and the masses are not cheering. They're booing. In a weekend post on X, Levie argued that CEOs are "uniquely prone" to the condition "because they're sufficiently distant from the last mile of work" required to turn AI outputs into reliable business tools.
A graduating student holds up a sign at a Boston University commencement ceremony on May 2023. Credit: The Guardian
When executives experiment with AI, Levie wrote, "they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents." An executive might vibe-code what looks like a disruptive product prototype, he argued, but never has to review the underlying code before it ships – or verify the legal terms in a contract an AI just generated.
