In a previous opinion piece for Mumbrella, I spoke of the crisis in training for newcomers to our industry. Now, at the risk of casting myself as a doom monger, there is an even more acute crisis facing our industry and it isn’t getting the attention it needs.

A major study published in Harvard Business Review last month, conducted by Boston Consulting Group, confirmed what many of us are seeing on the ground. They named it “AI brain fry”: mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond cognitive capacity.

This isn’t burnout. Not at first anyway. AI brain fry is something sharper and faster. It’s the acute cognitive overload that can hit after a single heavy session of prompting, reviewing outputs and chasing AI-generated options that keep multiplying faster than any human can meaningfully evaluate.

And here’s the finding from the BCG study that stopped me: 26% of marketing professionals reported experiencing it. More than any other function surveyed. This is real, and it’s on the rise.

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The AI tap has become a fire hose. Is it any wonder we’re struggling to drink from it?

The tell-tale signs

Hands up if you recognise any of this. Spinning plates with AI and ending the day with more options than you started with and no clearer sense of which one to back. The plates keep spinning. Nothing lands.

Then there’s the urge to keep iterating. One more prompt. One more version of the deck that’s already good enough. AI makes the next iteration feel almost free, but the cost is the creeping anxiety that the latest version is never quite right.

You find yourself second-guessing decisions you’ve already made because AI has helpfully shown you fourteen alternative paths you didn’t take. That’s not strategic thinking. That’s doubt wearing a productivity badge.

And it’s happening around the clock, on phones at the dinner table, or at the dog park. AI is always on, always ready, and the line between thinking and prompting for some has completely dissolved.

The real costs of infinite options and AI brain fry? Doubt. Then fatigue. Then, comes the burnout.

We built the wrong mental model for the AI era

Until now, the anxiety in marketing and media leadership came from scarcity. Not enough good ideas. Not enough data. Not enough time. AI, we’re told, will fix all of that. And in many ways, it does.

But in solving the scarcity problem, we’ve created something worse: abundance without a filter.

AI may have obliterated old constraints, making ideas cheap and infinite. But the cognitive machinery required to evaluate, prioritise and commit is still running on the same hardware we had before.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz called this out decades ago. His work on the paradox of choice showed that more options don’t produce better outcomes. They produce paralysis. People presented with too many choices freeze, second-guess, and often feel worse about whatever they eventually decide. He’s now updating his thinking for the AI era, warning the problem is getting worse.

But when faced with the paradox of choice, subtraction becomes a skill.

Also last month, ActivTrak’s annual workplace report found the average organisation is now running seven AI tools, up from just two in 2023. But whether overloading with multiple tools, or just gorging on one or two, many leaders are white anting their own success.

They’re not struggling to generate ideas. They’re struggling to believe in any of them long enough to actually follow through. Every strategy feels like it could be iterated into something better with one more prompt. The result isn’t momentum. It’s drift.

And drift is deadly.

Thinking like a robot can fry your circuits

Anyone who’s built and run their own agency, as I have, can tell you that the cost of not deciding is higher than the cost of deciding imperfectly. More tools didn’t give me a competitive edge, it was the ability to weigh up the choices, subtract the options, and back myself that did.

Good leaders are paid for their ability to cut through the options available and make the tough, creative, incisive calls. The best develop a ruthless clarity about what they are and are not pursuing. Their success is often defined more by what they decline than what they accept.

In this AI arms race era, I firmly believe it’s the skill of subtraction that will allow the best leaders to pull ahead. When everyone has access to the same raft of tools, the ability to choose what to ignore has become one of the most valuable leadership capabilities.

And the good news is it’s teachable. In my time leading pitches for M&C Saatchi I saw first-hand the power of simplicity. Brutal Simplicity of Thought is a belief system that was drummed into me, respected by clients, and carried into an incredible streak of pitch wins. Today I still deploy it as a principle with the leaders I work with.

Three things that help

Before you arrive at these the hard way, here are some practical steps you can take to minimise the risks of AI brain fry. Some prompts, if you like!

Set the ceiling:

The next time you open an AI-assisted thinking session, decide how many rounds of iteration you’ll allow yourself. Three is the ceiling I use with clients. Generate, refine, refine once more — then stop. Work on something else. Come back with fresh eyes if you need to, but don’t let the promise of a better version become the reason you never commit to this one.

The urge to run one more prompt is almost always a signal that you’re searching for certainty rather than quality. At some point the work is good enough, and moving becomes the priority. The leaders winning right now aren’t the ones who found the perfect answer. They’re the ones who made a good call, backed it, and got moving while everyone else was still prompting.

Do this and you’ll move faster, feel better, and win more.

Protect the quiet:

Block time without AI tools to simply think without having to decide. Not to generate options. Not to review outputs. Just to sit with a question and let your own judgment catch up with the volume you’ve been processing.

This sounds almost offensively simple. It isn’t. The brain recovers from decision-making the way muscles recover from exercise.

Most high achievers have scheduled every hour of their week except the one their cognition actually needs. In an AI-saturated environment, white space isn’t inefficiency, it’s a performance strategy. I’ve seen it change the quality of decisions faster than almost anything else.

Find your editor:

Every leader I work with who is navigating this well has one thing in common: someone outside the noise helping them decide what not to pursue. Not a sounding board inside the organisation, but someone with no stake in the answer and enough commercial experience to push back without hedging.

Longtime Google CEO Eric Schmidt called hiring an external thinking partner, who he worked with weekly for fifteen years, the best professional decision he ever made. He understood that being outside the noise is a fundamentally different cognitive position from being inside it. That was true before AI made optionality infinite. The argument has only got stronger since.

A genuinely independent thinking partner with real commercial experience gives you something AI cannot: a structured space to think out loud, stress-test your thinking, and make faster decisions with less self-doubt.

These three steps won’t eliminate AI brain fry. But in my experience, they’re where the damage stops.

Because out-thinking your competition got you here. Overthinking your options is what will slow you down.

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