AI tools create new workplace stress, study warns

One idea about Artificial Intelligence in the workplace goes like this: it’s like having a team of people to whom you can delegate your hardest tasks, giving you the freedom to think strategically and maybe—just maybe—have a long lunch or go home early. Or perhaps be more productive and earn more money. It’s a nice idea.

But, as anyone who has ever had a boss or been a boss knows, management is a job in itself, a job that comes with its own type of stress and frustration. And that doesn’t change even if the “people” in question aren’t people at all, CE Report quotes Kosova Press.

For participants in a recent study by Boston Consulting Group, the experience of supervising many AI “agents”—autonomous software designed to execute tasks rather than simply produce information like a chatbot—created an acute sense of “noise”: a mental fog that left workers exhausted and struggling to focus.

The study’s authors call it “AI brain drain” (or “AI brain strain”), defined as mental fatigue “from overusing or supervising AI tools beyond a person’s cognitive capacity.”

“Contrary to the promise of having more time to focus on meaningful work, juggling and multitasking may become the defining features of working with AI,” the authors wrote in the study published last week by Harvard Business Review.

“This AI-related mental strain carries significant costs in the form of increased employee errors, decision fatigue, and the intention to quit.”

Workers quoted in the study reminded the writer of older millennials around 1997 who rushed home to take care of their Tamagotchi devices.

“It felt like I had a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all competing for attention,” one senior engineering manager told researchers. “I caught myself rereading the same things, overthinking far more than usual, and becoming oddly impatient. My thinking wasn’t broken—just noisy, like mental static.”

This is just one new side effect of a push by company leaders to get workers to use more AI. Last fall, a report by Harvard Business Review described the rise of “workslop” — meaningless AI-generated memos and presentations that end up creating more work for colleagues who must fix the mistakes made by bots, according to CNN.

“Workslop” reflects a kind of “cognitive surrender,” where workers feel unmotivated and hand tasks to AI without paying much attention to the results, said Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, a psychiatrist and co-author of both reports.

“Brain drain is almost the opposite,” she explained. “It’s like trying to go head-to-head—intelligence against intelligence—with AI.”