AI Doesn’t Reduce Work – It Intensifies It

The Harvard Business Review – “…Right now, many companies are worried about how to get more employees to use AI. After all, the promise of AI reducing the burden of some work—drafting routine documents, summarizing information, and debugging code—and allowing workers more time for high-value tasks is tantalizing. But are they ready for what might happen if they succeed? While leaders are focused on promised productivity gains, they may find themselves surprised by the complex reality, and may not see what these gains are costing them until it’s too late. 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…”

See also America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs “…The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization. It sends out detailed surveys to about 60,000 households and 120,000 businesses and government agencies every month, supplemented by qualitative research it uses to check and occasionally correct its findings. It deserves at least some credit for the scoreboard. America: 250 years without violent class warfare… Elon Musk warned in a typical early pronouncement—the AI industry has pivoted from the language of nightmares to the stuff of comas. Driving innovation. Accelerating transformation. Reimagining workflows. It’s the first time in history that humans have invented something genuinely miraculous and then rushed to dress it in a fleece vest. There are gobs of money to be made selling enterprise software, but dulling the impact of AI is also a useful feint. This is a technology that can digest a hundred reports before you’ve finished your coffee, draft and analyze documents faster than teams of paralegals, compose music indistinguishable from the genius of a pop star or a Juilliard grad, code—really code, not just copy-paste from Stack Overflow—with the precision of a top engineer. Tasks that once required skill, judgment, and years of training are now being executed, relentlessly and indifferently, by software that learns as it goes. AI is already so ubiquitous that any resourceful knowledge worker can delegate some of their job’s drudgery to machines. Many companies—Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers among them—have instructed their employees to increase productivity by doing just that. But anyone subcontracting tasks to AI is clever enough to imagine what might come next—a day when augmentation crosses into automation, and cognitive obsolescence compels them to seek work at a food truck, pet spa, or massage table. At least until the humanoid robots arrive…”