In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it. In an eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits at a U.S.-based technology company with about 200 employees, we found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. Importantly, the company did not mandate AI use (though it did offer enterprise subscriptions to commercially available AI tools). On their own initiative workers did more because AI made “doing more” feel possible, accessible, and in many cases intrinsically rewarding.
While this may sound like a dream come true for leaders, the changes brought about by enthusiastic AI adoption can be unsustainable, causing problems down the line. Once the excitement of experimenting fades, workers can find that their workload has quietly grown and feel stretched from juggling everything that’s suddenly on their plate. That workload creep can in turn lead to cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems.
[...]
Because AI can fill in gaps in knowledge, workers increasingly stepped into responsibilities that previously belonged to others. Product managers and designers began writing code; researchers took on engineering tasks; and individuals across the organization attempted work they would have outsourced, deferred, or avoided entirely in the past.
[...]
Because AI made beginning a task so easy—it reduced the friction of facing a blank page or unknown starting point—workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks. Many prompted AI during lunch, in meetings, or while waiting for a file to load. Some described sending a “quick last prompt” right before leaving their desk so that the AI could work while they stepped away.
These actions rarely felt like doing more work, yet over time they produced a workday with fewer natural pauses and a more continuous involvement with work. The conversational style of prompting further softened the experience; typing a line to an AI system felt closer to chatting than to undertaking a formal task, making it easy for work to spill into evenings or early mornings without deliberate intention.
[...]
AI introduced a new rhythm in which workers managed several active threads at once: manually writing code while AI generated an alternative version, running multiple agents in parallel, or reviving long-deferred tasks because AI could “handle them” in the background. They did this, in part, because they felt they had a “partner” that could help them move through their workload.
[...]
Over time, this rhythm raised expectations for speed—not necessarily through explicit demands, but through what became visible and normalized in everyday work. Many workers noted that they were doing more at once—and feeling more pressure—than before they used AI, even though the time savings from automation had ostensibly been meant to reduce such pressure.
[...]
But our research reveals the risks of letting work informally expand and accelerate: What looks like higher productivity in the short run can mask silent workload creep and growing cognitive strain as employees juggle multiple AI-enabled workflows. Because the extra effort is voluntary and often framed as enjoyable experimentation, it is easy for leaders to overlook how much additional load workers are carrying. Over time, overwork can impair judgment, increase the likelihood of errors, and make it harder for organizations to distinguish genuine productivity gains from unsustainable intensity. For workers, the cumulative effect is fatigue, burnout, and a growing sense that work is harder to step away from, especially as organizational expectations for speed and responsiveness rise.
I thought this was going in a totally different direction when I read the title. I was expecting an article about how people can so quickly and easily generate pages of slop text that it makes more to wade through.
But that’s probably because I had to do just that today when a senior colleague “helpfully” provided 13 pages of word documents with clearly AI generated ideas and posted them in the shared project folder for someone else to integrate into the other document we were using to develop a set of clear, concise guiding aims.
Frictionless, not addictive. Any individual moment takes almost no energy, so it fills any time you have any thought about work. That makes maintaining a work/life boundary much harder than at times when it was harder to switch between work and the rest of your life. It's another step beyond having your work laptop at home with you. When work is always just a query away, you have to build and maintain that boundary all the harder, and your boss has minimal interest in defending your boundaries for you.
[OP] skybrian | 6 hours ago
From the article:
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
WeAreWaves | an hour ago
I thought this was going in a totally different direction when I read the title. I was expecting an article about how people can so quickly and easily generate pages of slop text that it makes more to wade through.
But that’s probably because I had to do just that today when a senior colleague “helpfully” provided 13 pages of word documents with clearly AI generated ideas and posted them in the shared project folder for someone else to integrate into the other document we were using to develop a set of clear, concise guiding aims.
I’m clearly still salty about it.
snake_case | 2 hours ago
Are they suggesting that using AI for work is addictive?
MimicSquid | 2 hours ago
Frictionless, not addictive. Any individual moment takes almost no energy, so it fills any time you have any thought about work. That makes maintaining a work/life boundary much harder than at times when it was harder to switch between work and the rest of your life. It's another step beyond having your work laptop at home with you. When work is always just a query away, you have to build and maintain that boundary all the harder, and your boss has minimal interest in defending your boundaries for you.
[OP] skybrian | 20 minutes ago
Yes, if you mean like how some video games can be fun and "addictive."