Box founder Aaron Levie warns tech CEOs are suffering from "AI psychosis," making unfounded automation assumptions without understanding real-world implementation challenges.

Aaron Levie argues CEOs are 'uniquely prone to AI psychosis' because they are 'sufficiently distant from the last mile of work' and see only happy-path AI results—like playing with prototypes or generating contracts—without understanding the actual labor required to review code, catch bugs, and manage real-world deployment.

In the first five months of 2026, 115,430 people have been fired from 152 tech companies, compared to 124,636 people let go by 275 companies in all of 2025; many companies cite AI as the reason, though researchers argue some layoffs are being falsely attributed to AI productivity gains.

MIT researchers concluded that AI agents are not yet producing human-quality work on most tasks and predict models will 'be able to complete most text-related tasks with success rates of, on average, 80%–95% by 2029 at a minimally sufficient quality level,' with agents needing 'another few years to outperform humans.'