TIME
Founders Adopted AI To Reclaim Hours And Became The Bottleneck
Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found that 82% of business leaders called it a pivotal year to rethink strategy and operations because of artificial intelligence, while 46% expected to expand capacity using digital labour within 12 to 18 months. Yet founders who adopted these tools to reclaim hours report that the first draft now takes seconds while the review still demands their experience.
The intention was scale: automate execution, free the calendar. What arrived instead was a founder positioned as final reviewer of nearly every proposal, campaign, customer response and recommendation before it reaches the outside world. The overwhelm no longer comes from producing the work but from approving it, and a separate Microsoft research study found that workers with greater confidence in AI engaged in less critical thinking.
Source: Entrepreneur · September 19, 2026