An eight-month study at a US technology company found that AI tools did not reduce employees’ workloads but consistently intensified them.
Researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business published their findings in Harvard Business Review, describing the research as in-progress.
They found that workers used AI to take on tasks outside their normal roles, worked through breaks by sending prompts over lunch or between meetings, and juggled multiple AI-assisted workflows at once.
None of this was mandated by the company, which offered enterprise AI subscriptions but did not require employees to use them.
Workers expanded their own workloads because AI made doing more feel possible, the researchers found.
Product managers and designers began writing code, researchers took on engineering tasks, and employees across the organisation attempted work they would previously have outsourced or avoided entirely.
Engineers then spent more time reviewing and correcting AI-assisted work produced by colleagues who were, as the study put it, “vibe-coding.”
The boundary between work and rest eroded too. Workers described sending a “quick last prompt” before leaving their desks so the AI could work while they stepped away.
Over time, prompting during breaks became habitual, and downtime no longer provided the same recovery.
One engineer told the researchers, “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 findings echo a separate trial reported by Decrypt last summer, which found experienced developers using AI tools took 19% longer on tasks while believing they were 20% faster.
TechCrunch reported that the earliest signs of burnout are coming from the employees who embraced AI the most.
A DHR Global survey of 1,500 corporate professionals found 83% were experiencing burnout, with overwhelming workloads and excessive hours as the leading causes.
The Berkeley researchers warned that without intentional norms around AI use, short-term productivity gains risk giving way to cognitive fatigue, lower quality work, and increased turnover.
