As the talk over AI’s function within the office rages on, some consultants warn that eliminating menial duties with AI may include a hidden price to productiveness.
In a Monetary Instances op-ed final 12 months, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stated AI brokers have been serving to customer support employees resolve extra queries and serving to programmers write extra code.
“This is freeing human teams to accelerate projects and deepen relationships with customers,” he stated.
The message was clear: AI is taking up extra of the grunt work so workers can do the duties that matter most.
However in a future the place AI absorbs the duties that make our workdays barely monotonous—like coming into knowledge, organizing our inbox, or updating paperwork—would possibly we really miss the boring duties that break up the work day?
Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and writer of the upcoming e book The Psychological Power Playbook, informed Fortune we simply would possibly.
Whereas executives like Benioff tout AI’s skill to release people for higher-level duties, Morin stated the boring, repetitive, duties that workplace employees full every day are crucial to offer our brains a break.
“We only have so much attention and so much mental bandwidth. And if we’re doing these high-level tasks all day long, we’re going to run out of energy way faster,” she stated.
Drawback fixing may additionally endure with out these low-effort digressions. Finishing a straightforward, accomplishable accountability lets employees nonetheless really feel productive with out exerting an excessive amount of psychological effort.
“My concern is that if we think we’re going to be diving in, focusing on solving a problem and focusing on it all day long, your brain doesn’t get that opportunity to get a fresh perspective or to get a break and to come back and look at it from a different angle,” Morin stated.
Analysis from the College of Texas at Austin printed within the peer-reviewed journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Administration discovered that each 5 minutes of low-effort, low-distraction pauses, boosted productiveness by 7.12%.
In the meantime, different sorts of interruptions, like lunch breaks, harm productiveness when employees return to a activity. The researchers blamed the discrepancy on focus. When a employee took a lunch break, they mentally disengaged and have been pressured to pay “cognitive restart costs” when returning to work. However a low-effort pause stored them engaged.
This analysis lends extra credence to the concept eradicating undemanding duties from employees’ days might inadvertently strip away the pauses that maintain them cognitively locked in.
To make certain, AI has already demonstrated some potential advantages for employees. A 2025 examine by the Federal Reserve Financial institution of St. Louis discovered that, amongst employees who used AI instruments every day, a 3rd stated it saved them 4 hours or extra every week. That’s as work-related stress has remained elevated because the pandemic, in accordance with Gallup, whereas different research present a majority of employees expertise burnout. Saving them a while every week may very well be a optimistic.
However burnout isn’t one-dimensional. It may be related to each fixed repetitive work or continually doing high-level duties, Jessica Watrous, a licensed psychologist and the chief scientific officer of psychological well being care platform Fashionable Well being, informed Fortune. What would possibly greatest improve employees’ cognitive skills is a stability between the 2 sorts of duties that works throughout the limits of the human mind.
“Our cognitive load and our ability to kind of store things, it’s pretty stable,” she stated. “Just because you have a tool to make you more productive, is your brain fully ready for that?”
