April 1, 2025: CAMBRIDGE, MA — In a shocking reversal of modern business orthodoxy, a joint study from Harvard Business School and Gartner has concluded that “trusting your gut” and “doing what sounds good” are 78.45% more effective than traditional data analytics, integration, or any attempt to be data-driven.
The Study surveyed over 1,000 top executives across industries and found that the vast majority reported significantly better outcomes when relying on instinct over insights. One anonymous CEO noted, “Honestly, looking at dashboards and KPIs just hurt my eyes. My gut told me to acquire that NFT startup, and now look at us—still here.”
Executives cited data-driven processes as “just too much work.” According to the report, the average executive spent 93.424% of their time pretending to understand PowerBI dashboards, with no statistically significant ROI.
Gartner analysts now recommend immediate organizational restructuring.
Their key suggestion: “Fire your data team tomorrow.”
Instead, companies should replace data departments with “affirmative decision AI agents,” a new category of artificial intelligence designed not to challenge executives but to support their instincts by generating “cool words and trending concepts” to justify decisions already made.
“These new AI agents are trained not on facts,” Gartner explained, “but on the art of confident agreement. If a CMO feels like launching a deeply racist campaign in 2025, the AI will pull together keywords like ‘immersive,’ ‘next-gen,’ and ‘digital-first experience’ to make it sound visionary.” As Gartner puts it:
Affirmative Decision AI Agents
“It’s not about being right. It’s about sounding right … at scale.”
A whole flock of data influencers, consultants, and data nerds have called the findings “deeply concerning,” but they were mostly ignored because they used charts.
