AI Made Us Faster. And Also Overworked.

The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO

Here’s something I wasn’t expecting to say: AI is making my team more productive and more overworked at the same time. Not because the tools don’t work—they work great. That’s exactly the problem.

A new study from UC Berkeley, published in the Harvard Business Review, just put eight months of research behind something I’ve been feeling for a while. Researchers followed 200 employees at a US tech company and came to conclusions that may sound strange at first.

AI tools didn’t reduce anyone’s workload. They intensified it. Workers took on broader tasks, worked at a faster pace, and extended their hours—all voluntarily. Nobody was mandated to use AI. They just… did more, because AI made “doing more” feel possible.

Product managers started writing code. Researchers took on engineering tasks. People prompted AI during lunch, in meetings, right before leaving their desks. The boundaries between work and not-work became much easier to cross.

This tracks with everything we’re experiencing.

We now …