AI boosts productivity for workers but could hurt them long-term, study finds
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The good news is AI is actually making workers more productive, rather than obsolete. The bad news? Employers might expect that productivity regularly, leading to pressure and burnout.
The big picture: Companies may need AI guardrails to avoid overwork while protecting increased productivity, researchers wrote in Harvard Business Review.
Driving the news: The researchers wrote this week that AI increased productivity for employees, rather than reducing work for them to do, in a recent eight-month study.
- Their analysis of a U.S.-based technology company with about 200 workers found that "employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so."
- The company did not mandate AI use, they said.
Zoom in: The researchers found that AI increased productivity in three key ways.
- Task expansion: Workers increasingly stepped into responsibilities that belonged to others, such as product designers writing code.
- Blurring boundaries between work and nonwork: "Many prompted AI during lunch, in meetings, or while waiting for a file to load."
- More multitasking: Employees performed more tasks simultaneously because "they felt they had a 'partner.'"
Friction point: While AI increased productivity at the company, "Over time, this rhythm raised expectations for speed," the researchers wrote.
- "Many workers noted that they were doing more at once" than before AI, "even though the time savings from automation had ostensibly been meant to reduce such pressure."
That could be bad for both company leadership and employees.
- Overwork can impair judgment and lead to errors, and cause "fatigue burnout, and a growing sense that work is harder to step away from."
Reality check: Studies show that long-term AI use may not be healthy.
- A study last year from researchers at MIT's Media Lab found that regular ChatGPT users underperformed their peers "at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."
What we're watching: The researchers suggested that companies institute an "AI practice" to address overwork, which includes routines around starting, stopping, and limiting scope of AI use.
Zoom out: AI's transformation of the labor market has mostly left hiring and firing at a stalemate, but its impact is still growing, data shows.
- AI was responsible for nearly 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. last year, according to a December report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
