AI ISN’T REDUCING WORK, IT’S INTENSIFYING IT

Will AI really mean we end up doing less? What if we end up doing more? And what if task intensity keeps increasing?

New research from Berkeley Haas - published in HBR - studied a 200-person tech company for eight months. They found AI intensifies work in three specific ways.

1. Task Expansion:

Employees take on responsibilities outside their traditional roles as AI makes unfamiliar tasks feel accessible. Product managers write code, researchers handle engineering tasks and workers absorb tasks that previously would have justified additional headcount.

2. Blurred Work Boundaries:

AI's ease of use leads workers to slip work into breaks, lunch hours and off-hours. The conversational nature of prompting makes work feel less formal, causing it to spill into evenings and mornings, unintentionally.

3. More Multitasking:

Workers manage multiple parallel workflows, creating cognitive load and constant attention-switching. Which is tiring.

And engineers? They inherit a new category of labour: reviewing, correcting and coaching colleagues who are now vibe coding their way through their task list.

All of which means the very tangible time savings are consumed by all this new work. Productivity levels explode. But so does the intensity of our days.

In our own AI-native organisation - and across the clients we're helping become AI native - we can report similar experiences. And it speaks to a truism we might all recognise - the total amount of work has never been a fixed quantity. There's always more you can do.

The researchers propose developing corporate norms around when to pause, how to sequence work and preserve human connection. And the challenge for AI-native enterprises will be to build incentive structures which promote the de-escalation of intensity.

Otherwise, the real risk is less about job loss. And far more about unsustainable productivity surges that lead to burnout and decision fatigue.