Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

Box CEO Aaron Levie coined the term 'AI psychosis' to describe how tech CEOs, distanced from day-to-day work, overestimate AI's capabilities and make sweeping workforce decisions based on limited hands-on experience. In 2026's first five months, 115,430 tech workers have already been laid off — nearly matching all of 2025 — with AI cited as a primary driver. Research from UC Berkeley, NBER, and MIT challenges the productivity narrative: there's no robust link between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gains, agents still fall short of human-quality work in many cases, and MIT predicts base competence on most tasks only by 2029. A Harvard Business Review study adds that widespread AI use simply shifts bottlenecks to executives. The piece argues that without grounded understanding of AI's real limitations, CEO-driven AI optimism risks organizational chaos.