As AI becomes a strategic imperative, CEOs must remain engaged without allowing an always-on culture to consume their attention. Executive coach and psychotherapist Peter Carnochan argues that this requires a rethink of how leaders allocate their time.
There is little appetite for asking America’s CEOs to work longer hours. The burnout rate among CEOs of organizations with 1,000-plus employees is reported to be 73%, with Deloitte putting the figure even higher at 82%.
Work-life balance does not seem to have moved on since a 2018 HBR study found that chief executives work at least 62.5 hours a week, including weekends. If anything, the pressure is increasing. As Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of chip company Cerebras, put it, it is now “mind-boggling” to think someone could work 38 hours a week, have work-life balance and still be successful.
The point is well made. CEOs do not necessarily need to work more hours, but the scale of the opportunity, and the uncertainty surrounding it, makes it difficult to disengage. Teams building AI applications are operating under a combination of opportunity and existential threat: billions are pouring into the sector and the upside could be enormous, but so is the risk something built today could become irrelevant tomorrow. A product could take months to develop, only for a model provider to introduce a capability that makes it obsolete.
Under those conditions, “pace yourself” as an approach may seem increasingly unrealistic, both professionally and personally. The consulting group BCG’s June 2026 research found that 72% of CEOs are directly responsible for AI decisions. Among the leaders the consulting firm identifies as “trailblazers”, CEOs spend at least eight hours a week upskilling themselves on AI, while half believe their career success depends on getting AI right.
Should traditional notions of work-life balance be reconsidered in the face of AI-driven productivity? Is the relentless pursuit of AI-enabled performance the new smoking and ultimately harmful?
A Tony Stark dynamic
From what I observe among Silicon Valley founders and VCs at the forefront of these developments, that perspective overlooks a crucial factor: many of these executives genuinely enjoy working at this pitch.
The intensity comes from the dizzying intoxication of a newfound superpower: an unprecedented ability to experiment and build. One founder estimates being at least 100 times more productive. As the gap between thought and working code is shrinking to nothing, the ability to turn concepts into reality is generating considerable excitement about where that acceleration might lead—and what becomes possible.
We might compare this experience to Tony Stark building his Iron Man suit and suddenly gaining extraordinary powers of speed and productivity.
The challenge is knowing when to take off such a powerful suit, and how to prevent an ever-growing capacity for work from becoming an ever-growing workload, however useful and welcome that work may be.
It’s fine to embrace opportunity, but recuperation is key
For years, the leadership conversation has been, “How do I protect my time? How do I create boundaries? How do I avoid burnout?,” AI, and the scale of its promise, may now require a more imaginative approach to work and its boundaries, at least for a period of time.
The goal is not necessarily to work less, but to become smarter about balancing intensity with recovery. When work is exhilarating, meaningful and unusually productive, it is unrealistic to expect top executives not to remain immersed in it.
My strong advice to executives in this position is to make every second of non-work time count, rather than filling it with another form of frenetic activity.
I do not generally advise executives engaged in important, innovative work to slow down or reduce their hours. Instead, the emphasis should be on protecting sufficient time for exercise, family, and sleep, building in genuine periods of downtime and, where possible, maintaining a regular day away from work.
Consider the Tour de France. Its elite participants push themselves to extraordinary levels of physical exertion, but rest days are built into the race and used consciously for active recovery through gentle exercise, massage, food and sleep.
What matters is stepping outside the machinery, even if only briefly. At present, it may not be realistic to expect founders and CEOs to be away from the laptop or Teams call for long periods, but sustained intensity without periods of rest risks becoming unsustainable. Time spent rekindling connection with partners, family, and indeed their own physicality remains essential.
AI is not going to stop accelerating, so the challenge is learning how to harness it without exceeding our human limits. And perhaps this raises a bigger question: will AI do this not just to founders and CEOs, but to their workforce too? Could the future of work require a new type of work-life balance which reconciles super-charged productivity and the realities of human capabilities?
Written by Dr. Peter Carnochan.
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