Probably the most seductive narrative in American work tradition proper now isn’t that AI will take your job. It’s that AI will prevent from it.
That’s the model the trade has spent the final three years promoting to hundreds of thousands of nervous people who find themselves keen to purchase it. Sure, some white-collar jobs will disappear. However for many different roles, the argument goes, AI is a power multiplier. You grow to be a extra succesful, extra indispensable lawyer, guide, author, coder, monetary analyst — and so forth. The instruments give you the results you want, you’re employed much less onerous, all people wins.
However a new study printed in Harvard Enterprise Evaluate follows that premise to its precise conclusion, and what it finds there isn’t a productiveness revolution. It finds corporations are vulnerable to turning into burnout machines.
As a part of what they describe as “in-progress analysis,” UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months inside a 200-person tech firm watching what occurred when staff genuinely embraced AI. What they discovered throughout greater than 40 “in-depth” interviews was that no person was pressured at this firm. No person was advised to hit new targets. Folks simply began doing extra as a result of the instruments made extra really feel doable. However as a result of they might do this stuff, work started bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The staff’ to-do lists expanded to fill each hour that AI freed up, after which stored going.
As one engineer advised them, “You had thought that possibly, oh, since you could possibly be extra productive with AI, then you definitely save a while, you may work much less. However then actually, you don’t work much less. You simply work the identical quantity or much more.”
Over on the tech trade discussion board Hacker Information, one commenter had the same reaction, writing, “I really feel this. Since my staff has jumped into an AI the whole lot working type, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and precise productiveness has solely gone up by possibly 10%. It looks like management is placing immense stress on everybody to show their funding in AI is value it and all of us really feel the stress to attempt to present them it’s whereas truly having to work longer hours to take action.”
It’s fascinating and likewise alarming. The argument about AI and work has at all times stalled on the identical query — are the beneficial properties actual? However too few have stopped to ask what occurs when they’re.
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June 23, 2026
The researchers’ new findings aren’t solely novel. A separate trial final summer time discovered skilled builders utilizing AI instruments took 19% longer on tasks whereas believing they have been 20% sooner. Across the identical time, a Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis examine monitoring AI adoption throughout hundreds of workplaces discovered that productiveness beneficial properties amounted to just 3% in time savings, with no vital influence on earnings or hours labored in any occupation. Each research have gotten picked aside.
This one could also be tougher to dismiss as a result of it doesn’t problem the premise that AI can increase what staff can do on their very own. It confirms it, then exhibits the place all that augmentation truly leads, which is “fatigue, burnout, and a rising sense that work is tougher to step away from, particularly as organizational expectations for pace and responsiveness rise,” in response to the researchers.
The trade wager that serving to folks do extra could be the reply to the whole lot. It could grow to be the start of a unique drawback solely.
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