AI Was Supposed to Make Work Easier. A New Study Shows It’s Doing the Opposite.
The analysis covered 443 million hours of work across 1,111 employers and found AI is intensifying activity across nearly every category.
AI was supposed to handle all the busy work to free us up for the important stuff. How’s that working out?
An analysis of 164,000 workers found that AI is actually revving up the speed, density, and complexity of work rather than reducing it. Time spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled after workers started using AI tools. Their use of business-management software rose 94%. Meanwhile, focused, uninterrupted work time—the kind needed to solve complex problems and strategize — fell by 9%.
“It’s not that AI doesn’t create efficiency,” said Gabriela Mauch, chief customer officer at ActivTrak, the workforce analytics company behind the study, told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s that the capacity it frees up immediately gets repurposed into doing other work.” The findings suggest that while AI may boost productivity in the short term, it could lead to cognitive overload, burnout, and declining work quality over time.
AI was supposed to handle all the busy work to free us up for the important stuff. How’s that working out?
An analysis of 164,000 workers found that AI is actually revving up the speed, density, and complexity of work rather than reducing it. Time spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled after workers started using AI tools. Their use of business-management software rose 94%. Meanwhile, focused, uninterrupted work time—the kind needed to solve complex problems and strategize — fell by 9%.
“It’s not that AI doesn’t create efficiency,” said Gabriela Mauch, chief customer officer at ActivTrak, the workforce analytics company behind the study, told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s that the capacity it frees up immediately gets repurposed into doing other work.” The findings suggest that while AI may boost productivity in the short term, it could lead to cognitive overload, burnout, and declining work quality over time.
