The first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most

The most tantalizing story 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 been selling for the past three years to millions of nervous people eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs will disappear. But for most other roles, AI is a force multiplier, the argument goes. You become a more skilled, indispensable lawyer, consultant, writer, coder, financial analyst – and so on. The tools work for you, you work less hard, everyone wins.

Only one new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what is found there is not a productivity revolution. It finds that companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines.

As part of what they describe as “ongoing research,” UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months at a 200-employee tech company to see what happened when employees really embraced AI. What they discovered from the more than forty in-depth interviews was that no one at this company was pressured. No one was told to hit new targets. People simply started doing more because the tools made them feel more doable. But because they were able to do these things, work began to extend into lunch breaks and late into the evening. Employees’ to-do lists expanded to include every hour AI freed up, and then continued.

As one engineer told them, “You thought that because you could be more productive with AI, you would save some time and work less. But in reality, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

On the technology industry forum Hacker News, one commenter had the same reactionwriting: “I feel this. Since my team switched to an AI work style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled, and actual productivity has only increased by maybe 10%. It feels like leadership is putting enormous pressure on everyone to prove that their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel pressure to try to show them that this is the case, when in reality we have to work longer hours to do so.”

It’s fascinating and also alarming. The discussion about AI and work has always been stuck on the same question: are the benefits real? But too few have stopped to wonder what happens when they are.

The researchers’ new findings are not entirely new. Last summer, experienced developers using AI tools found a separate trial 19% longer on tasks while they believed they were 20% faster. Around the same time, a National Bureau of Economic Research study tracking AI adoption in thousands of workplaces found that productivity gains amounted to only 3% time savingwithout significant impact on earnings or hours worked in any occupation. Both studies have been separated.

This one may be harder to ignore, because it doesn’t challenge the premise that AI can augment what workers can do on their own. It confirms this and goes on to show what all that expansion is actually leading to, which is “fatigue, burnout and a growing sense that it is harder to step away from work, especially as organizational expectations for speed and responsiveness rise,” the researchers said.

The industry is betting that helping people do more would be the answer to everything, but it could prove to be the start of an entirely different problem. The research is worth reading, here.