New research suggests that AI is making people work harder than ever before

A new study has found that rather than lightening the workload, AI could actually be making people work harder than before. 

Companies around the world have scrambled to introduce AI into their workflows in a bid to make workers more productive. 

In an ideal world, AI could be used to tackle the grunt work, while humans could handle the more creative parts – with some suggesting the 10-80-10 rule.

However, recent research of more than 400 million hours of work has found that rather than making things easier, AI use in the workplace is making the workload more intense.

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The study found that AI can make workloads more intense

Whether you use it to help you write professional-sounding emails, summarize large articles, or simply build a to-do list, there are millions of workers utilizing AI. 

Bill Gates has even suggested that the use of AI at work could mean humans end up working just two days a week within the next decade. 

But new research from ActivTrak appears to throw that theory on its head, as it found that using AI at work actually resulted in employees having to work harder than before. 

Researchers analyzed the digital work activity of 164,000 workers covering 443 million hours of work from more than 1,100 employers. 

The data was studied 180 days before and after workers began using AI tools, and ActivTrak found that AI ‘intensified activity across nearly every category’, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

The report found that time spent on emails and messaging apps more than doubled after AI was introduced, while the use of business management tools, like accounting software, rose a staggering 94 percent. 

Alongside that, the time workers were able to devote to focused, uninterrupted work dropped nine percent in those who used AI tools. 

The study suggested that there could be an ideal amount of AI use to boost productivity, with workers who spent just seven to 10 percent of their working hours using AI showing the most productivity. 

So it seems as though the solution is not scrapping AI use altogether, but using less of it in the workplace. 

“It’s not that AI doesn’t create efficiency,” ActivTrak’s chief customer officer Gabriela Mauch told The Wall Street Journal. 

“It’s that the capacity it frees up immediately gets repurposed into doing other work, and that’s where the creep is likely to happen.”

Another study also warned about AI ‘brain fry’ in the workplace

This isn’t the first study that has warned about the use of AI in the workplace. 

A  recent study from Boston Consulting Group has found that regular use of AI agents while working can cause ‘brain fry’. 

The researchers found that those who used a significant amount of AI tools while working had experienced mental fatigue caused by ‘excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity’. 

Much like the study above, this one found that moderate AI use – using between one and three tools – did typically lead to an increase in productivity, but once additional tools were added, this quickly dropped. 

“Contrary to the promise of having more time to focus on meaningful work, juggling and multitasking can become the definitive features of working with AI,” the study authors said.

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