Will it contribute to employee burnout?

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

Garg encouraged his staff to use the AI ​​language tool for the agency’s long list of day-to-day tasks, from pitching story ideas to clients, pitches to the media, and transcribing meeting and interview notes.

But instead of increasing the team’s productivity, it created stress and tension.

Staff reported that tasks actually took longer as they had to create a brief and prompts for ChatGPT while also double-checking 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 as long because we now expected them to use AI tools,” says Garg, who runs Everest PR and splits his time between the US and India.

The whole point of introducing AI to the business was to simplify people’s workflows, but it actually gave everyone more work to do and made them feel stressed and burned out.”

As a business leader, Mr. Garg also began to feel overwhelmed by the growing number of AI tools being launched, and he felt he had to keep up with each new addition. Not only did he use ChatGPT as his team, but Zapier to track team tasks and Perplexity to supplement client research.

“There is an overflow of AI tools on the market, and no single tool solves multiple problems. As a result, I constantly needed to keep track of multiple AI tools to complete tasks, which became more of a mess. It was hard to track which tool was supposed to do what and I started getting totally 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 that I struggled to manage, leading to burnout.”

Garg backed off on the mandate that the team 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 that we don’t use 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 is 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 Upworks’ survey of 2,500 knowledge workers in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, 96% of senior executives say they expect the use of AI tools to increase their company’s overall productivity levels – with 81% acknowledging increased demands to workers in the past year.

Yet 77% of employees in the survey say that AI tools have actually reduced their productivity and increased their workload. And 47% of employees using artificial intelligence 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 artificial intelligence in the workplace 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 resume writing company Resume Now.

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

Whether the technology is based on artificial intelligence or not, studies suggest that many workers are already feeling overwhelmed.

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

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

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

As Cassie Holmes, a management professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, commented in the study, “Using multiple apps requires extra 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 specializes in helping lawyers overcome burnout, with many coming to her feeling weighed down by their firms’ 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 increase from 50 to 250.

“The biggest thing I see is this constant, competing demand to do more with less – but companies don’t really consider whether the systems and technology they’re introducing is producing an outcome that isn’t useful,” says Bristol-based Ms. Steele.

“Everything moves so fast. It’s a constant struggle to keep things on track to develop expertise in such a cutting-edge field.”

The burnout lawyers are experiencing now, Steele adds, is not just about the growing amount of work technology and AI tools are facilitating, but also about the effects.

“When we look at burnout, it’s not just about the amount of work we do, but how we feel about the work and what we get out of it,” says Steele.

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

Steele adds: “You may also feel stressed about the risk of losing your job and the fear of being replaced because you no longer enjoy work as it has become so technologically driven.”

The Law Society of England and Wales recognizes that lawyers need better support from law firm managers to make the most of new technology such as 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 complete training and adapt their work processes. Many technologies are not originally designed for the legal sector, which can make the transition more challenging.”

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

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

But she claims that for small businesses with limited resources, artificial intelligence 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.”