Sooner or later, one has to surprise who actually advantages from the bogus intelligence revolution.
Take jobs, for instance.
AI evangelists together with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Invoice Gates, and OpenAI CEOSam Altman all say that the expertise may have most individuals, to some various diploma, working much less within the close to future.
Final yr, Gates shared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” that people would preserve some duties for themselves, however AI would make a two- or three-day workweek attainable.
In the meantime, uber-optimist “the moon is a distraction” Musk took the sci-fi tech fantasy a couple of steps additional. “There will be no poverty in the future” due to AI, a starry-eyed Musk declared on X (previously Twitter).
On “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he additionally shared his imaginative and prescient of an AI future the place “everyone has abundance, everyone has excellent medical care, everyone has whatever goods and services they want,” Enterprise Insider reported.
If these guarantees sound like a (dangerous) automobile salesman making an attempt to persuade you to purchase that TruCoat you do not want, then take into account the supply. Nonetheless, there are indicators that AI is already altering the job market.
Of the 244,851 world tech layoffs in 2025, almost 70,000, or about 30%, had been AI-related, in response to Digital Journal, citing data from foreign exchange dealer knowledge agency RationalFX.
Amazon is within the midst of shedding 16,000 staff, and whereas CEO Andy Jassyrecently clarified that the layoffs had been financially pushed, not AI-related, he additionally mentioned that AI wasn’t costing Amazon jobs, with an necessary caveat: “yet.”
Now, new analysis means that staff are those hurting as employers stress them to undertake AI to make their jobs simpler.
The idea that articial intelligence all the time reduces work deserves deeper examination, analysis reveals.
Picture by The Washington Submit on Getty Photographs
AI might not all the time scale back work
Identical to Invoice Gates, AI corporations are promoting an effectivity revolution to enterprise companions.
For numerous causes, staff have been sluggish to undertake AI instruments, with many not seeing an awesome use for them, in response to Gallup. However for individuals who have adopted the expertise and are utilizing it constantly, indicators of hassle have emerged.
Associated: Pinterest CEO fires again at employees preventing layoffs
UC Berkeley researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye carried out an eight-month examine of how generative AI affected work habits at an undisclosed U.S.-based tech firm with about 200 staff.
They discovered that staff, who obtained free entry to enterprise generative AI tech, labored at a sooner tempo, took on a broader scope of duties, and labored longer, “often without being asked to do so.”
The researchers emphasised that the corporate didn’t mandate AI use (not like some corporations which can be firing staff for not adopting AI quick sufficient, as Moneywise reported). Nonetheless, employees mentioned they used AI as a result of it made “doing more” really feel “possible, accessible, and in many cases intrisically rewarding.”
If this, like lots of the guarantees surrounding AI tech, sounds too good to be true with out some hidden dowside, then the remainder of what the researchers discovered is probably not very shocking.
“The changes brought about by enthusiastic AI adoption can be unsustainable, causing problems down the line,” in response to Ranganathan and Ye. “Once the excitement of experimenting fades, workers can find that their workload has quietly grown and feel stretched from juggling everything that’s suddenly on their plate.”
The added workload led to burnout, cognitive fatigue, and weakened decision-making.
In the end, the surge in worker productiveness they noticed to start with gave strategy to “lower quality work, turnover, and other problems.”
Researchers doc unfavorable results of generative AI on worker work
From April to December final yr, Ranganathan and Ye did in-person commentary two days every week on the tech firm.
The pair additionally monitored inner communication channels and carried out one other 40 in-person interviews throughout the engineering, product, design, analysis, and operations areas to attract their conclusions.
Associated: Layoffs in January attain recession-era ranges
They discovered that generative AI intensified staff’ work in three principal methods.
- Activity growth: Since AI can fill information gaps, researchers noticed staff taking up obligations that beforehand belonged to others. Product managers and designers started writing code, researchers took on engineering taks, and people throughout the group tried work they beforehand would have outsourced, deferred, or prevented fully.
- Work and non-work traces blurred: AI lowers the barrier of entry for a lot of duties, so this diminished friction led to employees to squeeze “small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks.” Researchers noticed staff sending prompts throughout lunch, in conferences, or whereas ready for a file to load. Though “these actions rarely felt like doing more work… over time they produced a workday with fewer natural pauses and a more continous involvement with work.”
- Extra multitasking: This new cadence led employees to try to handle a number of energetic threads without delay. Empoyees had been noticed “manually writing code while AI generated an alternative version, running multiple agents in parallel, or reviving long-deferred tasks because AI could ‘handle them’ in the background.”
How employers can defend staff throughout transition to generative AI use
Regardless of sluggish adoption charges, staff are more and more utilizing AI instruments to assist lighten their workloads.
Musk, Gates, and Altman are among the richest males on the planet, and the enterprise capital backing their respective AI performs simply eclipses their private fortunes.
With all of that funding and backing, extra employers, like Accenture, will inevitably begin mandating that staff use AI. However the Berkeley researchers supply a information to assist employers make that transition as seamless as attainable.
Employers ought to make use of extra intentional pauses or devoted break intervals when staff regulate their tempo. “For example, a decision pause could require, before a major decision is finalized, one counterargument and one explicit link to organizational goals — widening the attention field just enough to protect against drift,” the researchers mentioned.
Firms with AI help may profit from sequencing. Since AI allows fixed exercise within the background, “organizations can benefit from norms that deliberately shape when work moves forward,” defined Ranganathan and Ye. So as an alternative of an organization making a change each time the AI spits out an ill-advised suggestion, sequencing work “encourages work to advance in coherent phases.”
AI, because it reduces the necessity for collaboration, might encourage staff to “silo” themselves away from the remainder of the corporate. To fight this, human grounding is important, the researchers suggested. Whether or not it is by temporary check-ins, shared reflection moments, or structured dialogue, employers ought to fastidiously keep away from setting their staff adrift with AI massive language fashions as their solely companions.
Associated: Tesla proves it actually is a tech (not automobile) firm with newest transfer
