Hachette's CEO Writes Every Email Himself and Calls AI a Trap

By Olivia Hart

Sixty-eight percent of executives in the U.S. and U.K. now use AI to summarize documents, and 58% let it draft their emails, according to a survey by General Assembly and the coaching firm EZRA. Hachette CEO David Shelley wants no part of it. He writes every email himself and warns that AI-dependent leaders are heading for trouble.

Shelley did not soften the message. "I predict a growing dissonance between how someone appears in their written statements and how they are in real life," he told Fortune. Losing the habit of thinking through your own words, he said, produces a "worse C-suite."

Who is outsourcing their thinking?

The roster of AI-friendly chief executives is long. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky uses AI to write almost every "high-stakes" email he sends. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella relies on AI agents to digest his inbox and prepare him for meetings. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone of himself, trained on his tone and mannerisms, that can answer staff questions.

David Meadvin, a former Senate speechwriter who now runs the executive advisory firm One Strategy Group, sees both sides. "CEOs have stuff coming at them from every corner all the time, and some degree of summary is useful," he said. "We've had junior people doing news summaries since the beginning of time." His caveat cuts deeper: AI is "reliably average" and can "dilute brilliance."

The framing is familiar. Bill Gates told The New York Times in 2016 that he reads 50 books a year. Warren Buffett reportedly spends as much as 80% of his working day reading and thinking. In 2000, he told a Columbia Business School class to read 500 pages a day because knowledge "builds up, like compound interest." The new executive habit inverts that arithmetic.

Does ghostwritten communication actually damage trust?

The data suggests employees notice. In Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer, 73% of employees said CEOs have an obligation to build trust and bridge divides. Only 44% said their leaders were doing it well. That is a 29-point gap between expectation and delivery.

"Being able to write a good email yourself as a CEO is incredibly important," Shelley said. He conceded that a communications team or AI could make him more compelling. He still refuses to surrender what he calls the human quality in his writing.

Communications consultant and executive coach Natalie Sutton put the risk in market terms: "Fluency is becoming cheap. Sincerity is becoming scarce." Her full argument: "A slightly imperfect message that clearly came from the CEO will outperform a flawless one that could have come from anyone."

What happens to the brain on AI drafts?

Shelley's second worry is skill decay. "Being a leader, you often have to think on your feet," he said. Outsourcing communication to AI and other people, he added, "dulls the brain."

The research record gives that claim some support. In a 2025 MIT Media Lab study, participants who wrote essays with ChatGPT showed the weakest brain engagement of any group tested. Most could not quote from essays they had just written. Researchers call the broader pattern cognitive offloading, and studies have linked it to weaker critical thinking.

Sutton extended the point to judgment itself. "If AI does the first draft, leaders skip the part where they work out what they actually think," she said. "When information arrives pre-digested, you lose the habit of sitting with something messy long enough to understand it. I worry we'll have a generation of executives who can approve a message but can't build one."

Is AI also killing reading?

As head of one of the world's largest publishers, Shelley has an obvious stake, and he acknowledged none of it softly. He believes AI is accelerating the decline of reading for pleasure by changing how people consume information. "I think we're all being trained to just want shortcuts," he said.

The 2025 polling by U.K. charity Reading Agency backs part of that claim: 46% of U.K. adults said distractions made it hard to focus on reading, and 19% said their concentration had worsened over the past three years. Reading is also the most commonly cited habit among billionaires, according to a JPMorgan report.

The skill loss is not cosmetic. Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the New School for Social Research found that reading literary fiction sharpens people's ability to read others' emotions. Shelley ties the same qualities to leadership: "One of the key attributes of great leaders is intellectual curiosity and empathy."

The counterargument

Not everyone in the AI camp accepts the decline thesis. Daniela Amodei, president and cofounder of Anthropic, has argued the opposite: because AI models are already strong at STEM, qualities such as emotional intelligence, communication and curiosity are now at a premium. On that reading, AI removes the rote work and raises the price of the human skills Shelley fears losing.

Meadvin splits the difference and defends reading on personal grounds. "With disruption now constant," he said, "staying ahead depends on self-awareness and a commitment to life-long learning."

The open question is whether executives who never write the messy first draft can still do the judgment part of the job when the summary fails to arrive.