Over half (58 percent) of UK business leaders and CEOs are relying on "gut feel" to make vital business decisions, a new study has found.

This snap decision-making is being driven by a need for UK bosses to make decisions "faster than ever before", with many no longer having time to review data or think decisions through.

The research, conducted by technology company Confluent, surveyed 200 UK business owners and CEOs and uncovered a worrying over-reliance on guesswork and gut feel decisions made without reviewing the available data.

Key decisions being made using gut feel include managing people (73 percent), hiring new staff (56 percent) and even expanding businesses into new countries (53 percent).

According to Confluent, this over-reliance on guesswork and gut feel is down to a lack of 'real-time' insight into businesses - with many bosses having little visibility of their staff and wider organisations.

Richard Timperlake, a senior VP at Confluent, believes that many businesses will use technology to solve this problem, with three-quarters (77 percent) now investing in 'data streaming' tech to process business data in real time.

This will allow business leaders to have more up-to-date insights to inform their decisions.

He said: "British businesses need to move quickly to compete. But how can that be possible when CEOs are relying on out-of-date information?

"While a lot of entrepreneurs celebrate 'going with your gut', intuition can only get you so far. Today's CEOs need data, and they need it fast. Most of the data collected by businesses goes unused, quickly going out of date.

"Data streaming solves that by giving real-time insight to the people who need it most."