In the workforce, AI is having the opposite effect it was supposed to, UC Berkeley researchers warn

AI is making workers more productive, but it could also be burning them out, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley.

The revolution and the skyrocketing productivity AI promised is already taking hold in corporate America, including at an unnamed 200-person U.S. tech firm studied by the Berkeley researchers, an article about the in-progress research published in the Harvard Business Review shows.

Over the course of eight months and with the help of 40 “in-depth” interviews across engineering, product, design, research, and operations, the researchers found employees using AI tools increased both the work they could complete as well as the variety of tasks they could tackle—even when they weren’t forced to adopt the technology.

Yet, as employees’ productivity increased, so did the amount of work they took on, in part because AI made it easy to begin tasks. Soon, some workers were using up what previously had been natural breaks during the day to prompt AI, eventually filling most of their time at the office with tasks.

This type of implicit pressure paired with a la...