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Some of the pitches for artificial intelligence in the workplace include: It’s like having a team to take care of the grunt work for you, allowing you to think strategically and maybe even take a long lunch or go home early. Or maybe you can be more productive and make more money. That’s a good idea!
But as anyone who has or has been a boss knows, managing is a job in itself, and one that comes with its own set of stresses and hassles. And that doesn’t change if the “people” in question aren’t people at all.
For participants in a recent study by Boston Consulting Group, the experience of supervising multiple AI “agents,” autonomous software designed to perform tasks rather than simply bombarding them with information like a chatbot, caused a sharp feeling of “buzz” and left workers in a fog-like state where they were fatigued and struggled to stay focused. The study authors call this “AI brain fly” and define it as mental fatigue “due to overuse or oversight of AI tools that exceed cognitive capacity.”
“Despite the promise of having more time to focus on meaningful work, juggling and multitasking may become a defining feature of working with AI,” they write in their study. The Harvard Business Review published it last week. “The mental strain associated with this AI has significant costs in the form of increased employee errors, decision fatigue, and intent to quit.”
The workers cited in the study were very reminiscent of their Millennial predecessors, circa 1997, rushing home to take care of their Tamagotchis.
“It felt like I had a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for my attention,” one senior engineering manager told researchers. “I found myself rereading the same material, second-guessing it much later than usual, and becoming oddly anxious. My thoughts weren’t broken, they were just noisy. Like mental static.”
This is just one new side effect of a push by corporate executives to get their employees to use more AI. Last fall, a report in the Harvard Business Review chronicled the dire situation at “Workthrop.” This is meaningless AI-generated notes, pitch decks, and presentations that end up creating more work for colleagues who have to correct what the bots did wrong.
Psychiatrist Gabriela Rosen Kellerman, a co-author of both reports, said in an interview that Worklop reflects a kind of “cognitive capitulation” in which workers become discouraged and give work to AI and pay less attention to its output. “Brainfly is almost the opposite. It’s like trying to marry AI and tete-a-tete, intelligence with intelligence.”
Francesco Bonacci, CEO of Cua AI, which develops AI agents, described his AI fatigue as “vibe coding paralysis” (a reference to Silicon Valley’s tendency to build less sophisticated projects using AI prompts rather than traditional coding). “I end each day exhausted, not by the work itself; manage “Six work trees open, four unwritten features, two ‘quick fixes’ down rabbit holes, and a growing sense that we’re losing the plot entirely.”
To some extent, brain flies and work crops can both be cases of growing pains. Imagine bringing a middle-aged office worker from 1986 to the workplace of 2026 and asking them to send 10 emails, respond to Slack, and join a Zoom call with a social media team that is all working from home. When you tell people that Donald Trump is president and that it took them more than 30 years to make a “Top Gun” sequel, you can expect cognitive overload, not to mention confused looks.
Of course, people in general always learn how to become managers.
“I think this may be temporary,” said Matthew Kropp, co-author of the Brainfly study and BCG managing director. “These are tools that never existed before.”
Klopp compared the experience of someone managing multiple AI tools to that of someone who just learned to drive and was given a Ferrari. You can run very fast, but you can easily lose control.
Of course, even technology experts can sometimes find it difficult to control an AI assistant. Last month, Meta’s director of AI safety and moderation tweeted about her experience witnessing a bot nearly delete her inbox without her permission. “I had to run towards my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb,” she wrote, describing the incident as a “rookie mistake.”
Kropp and Kellerman emphasized that the findings are not all negative. Surprisingly, people experiencing brain flies were less likely to experience burnout, defined as a state of chronic workplace stress that accumulates over time and reduces a worker’s performance. Participants described brain flies as a profound experience.
“When they take a break, it goes away,” Kellerman said.
