The Truth About AI and Burnout in the Workplace

In this article, you’ll discover:

• Why a new study shows that using AI tools often leads to longer hours, not shorter ones.
• How “quick prompts” can accidentally eat up your lunch breaks and destroy your downtime.
• The hidden cost of task expansion where everyone tries to do everyone else’s job.
• Practical steps to build an “AI practice” that protects your time and sanity.

We have all heard the story. AI is supposed to save us. The idea is that it will handle the boring tasks, write our emails, and clean up our code. The result? We get to go home early and relax. It sounds perfect, doesn’t it?

But the reality is looking a little different. A new study published in Harvard Business Review followed this idea to its actual conclusion. What they found was not a productivity revolution. Instead, they found that companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines.

Working Harder, Not Smarter

Researchers from UC Berkeley spent eight months watching a tech company of about 200 people. They wanted to see what happened when workers really embraced AI. The results were surprising.

Nobody was told to hit new targets. Nobody was pressured. People just started doing more because the tools made it feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings.

As one engineer told them, “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then 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.”

The “Just One More” Trap

The study found that AI makes starting a task feel too easy. It takes away the fear of a blank page. Because of this, workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that used to be breaks.

Many people prompted AI during lunch or while waiting for a meeting to start. Some described sending a “quick last prompt“ right before leaving their desk.

These actions rarely felt like hard work. Typing a line to an AI system feels more like chatting than working. But over time, it meant there were no natural pauses in the day. The boundary between work and non-work did not disappear, but it became much easier to cross.

Doing Everyone Else’s Job

There was another form of work intensification found in the study. Because AI can fill in gaps in knowledge, workers started doing jobs that used to belong to other people.

Product managers began writing code. Researchers took on engineering tasks. People tried to do work they would have avoided in the past.

This sounds empowering, but it had a downside. Engineers spent more time reviewing and fixing “vibe-coding” produced by their colleagues. This oversight often happened informally, adding to everyone’s workload.

What We Need To Do

The promise of AI is not just about what it can do for work. It is about how we integrate it into our daily rhythm. The findings suggest that without a plan, AI makes it easier to do more, but harder to stop.

We need to build an “AI practice.” This means having intentional norms. We need intentional pauses to check our work. We need human grounding to connect with real people, not just bots.

If we don’t, we risk falling into a cycle of fatigue. The question isn’t whether AI will change work. It is whether we will shape that change, or let it shape us.