Blogmark

This 8-month study of 200 employees found that these employees used AI tools to work at a faster pace and take on a broader scope of work.

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.

Crucially,

The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems.

This all rings pretty true to my own experience. I am definitely finding that I'm able to get more done with these tools, but that is, in part, because I've convinced myself that I can take on extra work because of the upfront time savings.

It is an ongoing challenge to explore how to balance all of it.

The findings from this study seem consistent with what happened with factory automation in the 20th century. Instead of reducing the workload, automation intensified the work, made it more repetitive, and increased the chance of injury. The physical stakes of AI's introduction to knowledge work is much different, but the parallels are there.