A growing body of research shows that bringing AI into the workplace actually makes employees’ jobs harder, not easier.
The latest results come from ActivTrak’s new analysis of the digital work activities of more than 164,000 employees. By examining employee activity in the 180 days before and after employees started using AI in the workplace, the software company found that AI “enhanced” employees’ work in nearly every category. wall street journal Reported. Time spent on email, messaging, and chat apps has more than doubled, and business software usage has skyrocketed by 94%.
Remarkably, this came at the expense of the time workers spent on highly focused, uninterrupted work, which decreased by 9% for AI users but remained unchanged for non-AI users. The study cites findings that workers who spent 7 to 10 percent of their total work time using AI were the most productive, but that only 3 percent of AI users fell into this range, suggesting there may be a “sweet spot” for AI use.
“That’s not to say AI doesn’t create efficiencies,” said Gabriela Mauf, chief customer officer and head of the Productivity Lab at ActivTrak. WSJ. “The freed capacity is quickly reused for other work, increasing the likelihood of problems.”
The survey results are WSJ This report is one of the largest studies to date on the impact of AI on work habits. harvard business review They also conclude that AI is enhancing rather than reducing workload. In an ongoing study focused on employees at technology companies where the use of AI is voluntary, researchers have found that AI causes “workload creep,” where employees unknowingly take on more tasks than are sustainable. In this vicious cycle, AI has raised expectations for employee performance, which has led to employees becoming more reliant on AI to meet greater demands.
This means that the time that workers could potentially save by using AI is not passed on to them. It only raises expectations for themselves and their bosses about how much work they have to do, which leads them to quickly revert to AI tools. According to ActivTrak data, the average amount of time employees spend using it has increased eight times compared to two years ago. WSJAI adoption rate has risen to 80 percent.
“AI makes additional tasks feel easy and accessible to workers, creating momentum so workers often save time to do more rather than less,” said Aruna Ranganathan of the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, who led ongoing research on AI’s “workload creep.” WSJ. While it may increase productivity in the short term, over time “it can lead to cognitive overload, burnout, poor decision-making and reduced work quality,” she warned.
Other recent research has focused on the significant mental strain that AI causes for workers, giving rise to the troubling phenomenon of the “AI brain fly.” It identifies the technology encouraging information overload and task switching as some of the main causes behind it, echoing testimony from some programmers who, encouraged by recent interest in the subject, are criticizing the way AI is used in their work. But it turns out that the most mentally exhausting part is having to constantly monitor AI tools, with some employees having to monitor multiple AI agents performing different tasks at the same time.
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