A new study published in Harvard Business Review confirms what every high-performer already suspects: AI tools don’t reduce work, they intensify it. Researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye spent eight months studying a 200-person tech company and found that employees who adopted AI worked faster, took on more tasks, and extended their hours, all without being asked. We did not need a study to confirm that productivity tools increase productivity. Still, this one is worth a quick read.
They buried the most interesting finding in the middle of the article. Friction points (waiting for a colleague, staring at a blank page, struggling with an unfamiliar task) create natural rest periods for knowledge workers. When AI eliminates them, the boundary between working and not working becomes trivially easy to cross. The pause disappears, and the work expands to fill every available minute.
The researchers mapped an obvious escalation cycle. AI made tasks faster, which raised expectations for speed, which increased dependence on AI, which expanded the scope of what workers attempted, which increased the total volume of work. One engineer put it plainly: “You had thought that maybe because you could be more productive with AI, you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”
Every productivity tool in history has punished the people willing to sprint. Spreadsheets punished the fastest accountants. Email punished the most responsive managers. AI just removed the speed limit. Your best people will hit the wall first, because they are the ones running the hardest. If your AI deployment strategy does not include guardrails for pacing, you are optimizing for burnout.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.