Will AI make work burnout worse?

When ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, PR agency founder Anurag Garg was eager for his team of 11 to quickly incorporate the technology in their workflow, so the business could keep up with its competitors.

Mr Garg encouraged his employees to use the AI language tool for the agency’s long list of daily tasks, from coming up with story ideas for clients, pitches to offer the media, and transcribing meeting and interview notes.

But rather than increase the team’s productivity, it created stress and tension.

Staff reported that tasks were in fact taking longer as they had to create a brief and prompts for ChatGPT, while also having to double check its output for inaccuracies, of which there were many.

And every time the platform was updated, they had to learn its new features, which also took extra time.

“There were too many distractions. The team complained that their tasks were taking twice the amount of time because we were now expecting them to use AI tools," says Mr Garg, who runs Everest PR and divides his time between the US and India.

The entire aim of introducing AI to the company was to simplify people’s workflows, but it was actually giving everyone more work to do, and making them feel stressed and burnt out."

As a business leader, Mr Garg also began to feel overwhelmed by the growing number of AI tools being launched, and feeling he had to keep pace with every new addition. Not only was he using ChatGPT like his team, but Zapier to track team tasks, and Perplexity to supplement client research.

“There's an overflow of AI tools in the market, and no single tool solves multiple problems. As a result, I constantly needed to keep tabs on multiple AI tools to execute tasks, which became more of a mess. It was hard to track which tool was supposed to do what, and I started getting utterly frustrated,” says Mr Garg.

“The market is flooded with AI tools, so if I invest in a specific app today, there's a better one available next week. There's a constant learning curve to stay relevant, which I was finding hard to manage, leading to burnout.”

Mr Garg backtracked on the mandate that the team should use AI in all their work, and now they use it primarily for research purposes - and everyone is much happier.

“It was a learning phase for us. The work is more manageable now as we are not using too many AI tools. We’ve gone back to everything being done directly by the team, and they feel more connected and more involved in their work. It's much better,” says Mr Garg.

The stress Mr Garg and his team experienced using AI tools at work is reflected in recent research.

In freelancer platform Upwork’s survey of 2,500 knowledge workers in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, 96% of top executives say they expect the use of AI tools to increase their company’s overall productivity levels - with 81% acknowledging they’ve increased demands on workers over the past year.

Yet 77% of employees in the survey say AI tools have actually decreased their productivity and added to their workload. And 47% of employees using AI in the survey say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect.

As a result, 61% of people believe that using AI at work will increase their chances of experiencing burnout - rising to 87% of people under 25, as revealed in a separate survey of 1,150 Americans, by CV writing company Resume Now.

Resume Now’s survey also highlights how 43% of people feel AI will negatively impact work-life balance.

Whether the tech is based on AI or not, surveys suggest many workers are already feeling overwhelmed.

A further study by work management platform Asana highlights the effect of introducing more work-based apps.

In its survey of 9,615 knowledge workers across Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US, it found that, of those that use six to 15 different apps in the workplace, 15% say they miss messages and notifications because of the number of tools.

For those that use 16 or more, 23% say they are less efficient, and their attention span is reduced because of constantly having to switch apps.

As Cassie Holmes, management professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, commented in the study: “Using multiple apps requires additional time to learn them and switch between them, and this lost time is painful because we are so sensitive to wasted time.”

Lawyer turned coach Leah Steele now specialises in helping legal professionals overcome burnout, with many coming to her feeling burdened by their companies’ increased workload demands after introducing AI-based productivity tools. It’s an experience she’s familiar with, after the introduction of a new technology platform in a previous role saw her client caseload rise from 50 to 250.

“The biggest thing I'm seeing is this continuous competing demand to do more with less - but companies are not really considering whether the systems and the tech that they’re introducing are giving an outcome that isn't helpful,” says Bristol- based Ms Steele.

“Everything's moving so quickly. It's a constant battle to keep on top of things to develop expertise in such a cutting edge area.”

The burnout lawyers are now experiencing, Ms Steele adds, is not only about the growing volume of work tech and AI tools are facilitating, but the knock on effects.

“When we're looking at burnout, it's not just about the volume of the work we're doing, but how we feel about the work and what we're getting from it,” says Ms Steele.

“You could feel stressed about having ended up in an environment of high volume and low control, when what you originally wanted to do was interact personally with clients and make a difference to them.”

Ms Steele adds: “You could also feel stressed about the risk of losing your job, and the fear of being replaced because you’re no longer enjoying the work as it’s become so tech driven.”

The Law Society of England and Wales acknowledges that lawyers need better support from law firm leaders to make the most of new technology like AI.

“While AI and new technologies can make legal work more efficient by automating routine tasks, they can also create more work for lawyers, not less,” says president Richard Atkinson.

“Learning to use these tools takes time and lawyers often need to undertake training and adapt their work processes. Many technologies were not originally designed for the legal sector, which can make the transition more challenging.”

Alicia Navarro is the founder and chief executive of Flown, an online platform and community which helps people focus on “deep work” - tasks that require sustained concentration. She agrees that there is an “avalanche” of AI tools, but says they need to be used correctly.

“There's such a huge amount of filtering and learning that has to take place before these tools can even start to become productive elements in our lives”.

But she argues that for small firms, with limited resources, AI can be a big help.

“It’s an incredibly empowering thing for start-ups to be able to do a lot more, or companies to be able to pay more dividends or pay their team more.”

BBC