The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn’t that AI will take your job. It’s that AI will save you from it.
That’s the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs will disappear. But for most other roles, the argument goes, AI is a force multiplier. You become a more capable, more indispensable lawyer, consultant, writer, coder, financial analyst — and so on. The tools work for you, you work less hard, everybody wins.
But a new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn’t a productivity revolution. It finds companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines.
As part of what they describe as “in-progress research,” UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months inside a 200-person tech company watching what happened when workers genuinely embraced AI. What they found across more than 40 “in-depth” interviews was that nobody was pressured at this company. Nobody was told to hit new targets. People just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees’ to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.
As one engineer told them, “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”
Over on the tech industry forum Hacker News, one commenter had the same reaction, writing, “I feel this. Since my team has jumped into an AI everything working style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and actual productivity has only gone up by maybe 10%. It feels like leadership is putting immense pressure on everyone to prove their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel the pressure to try to show them it is while actually having to work longer hours to do so.”
It’s fascinating and also alarming. The argument about AI and work has always stalled on the same question — are the gains real? But too few have stopped to ask what happens when they are.
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The researchers’ new findings aren’t entirely novel. A separate trial last summer found experienced developers using AI tools took 19% longer on tasks while believing they were 20% faster. Around the same time, a National Bureau of Economic Research study tracking AI adoption across thousands of workplaces found that productivity gains amounted to just 3% in time savings, with no significant impact on earnings or hours worked in any occupation. Both studies have gotten picked apart.
This one may be harder to dismiss because it doesn’t challenge the premise that AI can augment what employees can do on their own. It confirms it, then shows where all that augmentation actually leads, which is “fatigue, burnout, and a growing sense that work is harder to step away from, especially as organizational expectations for speed and responsiveness rise,” according to the researchers.
The industry bet that helping people do more would be the answer to everything, but it may turn out to be the beginning of a different problem entirely. The research is worth reading, here.