Is AI Making Your Team Better or Busier?

When I first started using AI in my workday, I expected my productivity to increase, my output to go through the roof, and my ambition of a 4-day workweek to be closer than ever.

But that's not what happened, at least not the first time I tried to bring in AI (or the second or third). With the enthusiasm of someone who has spent over a decade in IT, deploying and adopting new technology and software, I started adding AI into every corner of my work.

The result was absolute overwhelm. It wasn't long before I was drowning in information, with a to-do list that had tripled, and somehow I felt less capable of doing my job than when I started. My head hurt, my eyes were blurry, and I began to question whether I really wanted to be part of the AI revolution.

And I wasn't the only one. Over the past 18 months, I have spoken with leaders and teams across multiple industries who want to adopt AI but feel overwhelmed by the tool before they can get a handle on it.

It's time to take a step back and understand exactly how AI is changing the way we work, and what changes we must make to work well with AI in the long term.

The Rise of Technostress

Technostress is not a new concept (it was first named in 1984), but it is becoming increasingly pervasive due to new technologies like AI.

When an organisation first deploys AI, the assumption is often that the tool will simply execute the old work faster. But the reality is more complex and disruptive. The technology creates entirely new types of tasks and demands.

Consider an employee responsible for drafting and reviewing content for the company website. Instead of writing one blog a week, AI can generate a draft in ten seconds. This massive increase in productivity and turnaround time creates a new expectation of what output looks like. As a result, that person is now expected to review, edit, and verify five drafts in a day, rather than write one article from scratch each week. The volume of decision-making explodes, and the cognitive load of constantly switching context, managing outputs, and verifying results intensifies.

This element of technostress is known as techno-overload, and I have seen it being experienced in both technical and non-technical teams.

The Decline of Boring Work

One way AI was promised to reduce stress and overload at work was by taking on routine, repetitive, and often boring tasks. AI excels at this, and so this seems like a win. In many ways, it is, but there are often unintended consequences.

I experimented with automating the majority of my repetitive tasks, from browsing online for industry updates each morning to pulling business metrics, updating my expenses, and deciding whether to send a follow-up email.

The workflows looked beautiful, and I felt very efficient. Until I wasn't. Within a few days, I was tired, creatively drained and unable to focus on the more complex work that AI was meant to free me up to do.

When AI optimises away your repetitive administrative tasks, the time you reclaim usually gets filled with more complex, higher-stakes, cognitively demanding work. A workday that becomes one hundred per cent deep thinking, back-to-back, is not sustainable.

Attention is a finite resource. Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine who has spent decades studying how people focus at work, describes it as a tank that fills and depletes throughout the day. When that tank is full, you can handle complexity, make good decisions, and think creatively. When it is running low, your thinking degrades, and you may not even notice it happening until it is too late.

Some ways the "tank" can be replenished include switching to low-demand or shallow work, like the expense report you could complete while half-listening to a podcast, the email you could draft on autopilot, or the repetitive but satisfying process of working through a familiar checklist. These tasks provide recovery time from the demands of the day, within the workday.

Mark's research found that people cannot sustain deep, focused attention for long stretches without performance degrading and stress increasing. The rhythm of moving between challenge and ease, complexity and routine is not inefficiency; it is how human attention works best.

When AI removes routine tasks, it removes the opportunity for recovery within work. If you want to avoid burnout, you must ask yourself: how can I give myself regular opportunities to recover from demanding work outside my midday lunch break?

Why AI Should Not Be Your Work Bestie

One of the fascinating things about using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Co-Pilot and others is how quickly you can develop a "relationship" with them. Conversation flows, the work gets done together, and it seems like you are both in sync.

When I talk about different tools, I sometimes refer to Chatty GPT, Curious Claude and Generic Gemini, almost assigning personalities to the different platforms. And when companies speak about treating AI as a team member or your personal assistant, it only adds to the humanisation of this technology.

That, in itself, is neither good nor bad in my opinion. My concern is what is being crowded out as we spend more time chatting with ChatGPT. According to the Upwork Research Institute, 90% of workers now view AI as a co-worker. Among the highest users of AI, 67% say they trust AI more than their human colleagues and 64% report a better relationship with the algorithm than with the people sitting next to them.

I know it can often seem easier to work with AI. It's always available to help, it doesn't sigh or roll its eyes, and it's always on your side. AI is frictionless, and that can be very appealing, especially if you are working under a lot of pressure.

But human growth, creativity, and resilience are largely built through the push and pull of working with other people, the moments where someone sees you are struggling and says something, and the small social interactions that regulate our stress without us even realising it.

When AI becomes the primary collaborator, those social interactions that give people a sense of connection and belonging disappear. When you combine this with increased job demands, it is a recipe for burnout.

Working Well with AI

With all that being said, the big question is, how do we work well with AI?

I use AI every day, and when I use it well, it genuinely changes what I can do and how I feel at the end of a working day. The difference between my first chaotic experiences and where I am now is not the technology; it's how I use it.

The most important change was to increase my awareness of how I used different AI tools and increase the variety in my daily work. Increasing your awareness could be as simple as having a clearer picture of what you want to achieve before you open the AI tool, noticing how long you are spending in the tool, and knowing when to step back and switch to another task.

This is linked to increasing the variety in work. With AI taking on many repetitive tasks, it's important to build in new recovery periods. This could mean switching working mode from the screen to a whiteboard or notebook to map out ideas or problems. Another example would be to switch from a creative task to an analytical one.

Finally, a good meeting with other people can be a recovery time from deep work. And, for me, spending time with others is probably the best way to avoid overload and burnout when working with AI. Instead of always asking the machine for help, ask a colleague. Offer to brainstorm with a team member who is stuck on a problem. Go for a walk or have a call with someone you work with and talk about what's on your plate at work. These might not seem like big actions, but these social habits help counterbalance the isolation that can happen if you begin to overly rely on AI.

Plus, you never know what great idea someone might have.

The same is true at an organisational level. AI will not automatically make your team more effective. It will amplify whatever conditions already exist. If your people are stretched, it will stretch them further. If your culture is already thin on connection and recovery, AI will make that thinner. But if you create the right conditions, where people have time to think, space to connect, and the confidence to work alongside these tools rather than be driven by them, the picture looks very different.

The question worth asking is not whether your team is using AI. The more important question is whether they are working well with it and whether you, as a leader, are helping to make that possible.

That starts with an honest conversation about how AI is used within your team and its impact beyond the work itself. That conversation can be harder than a tool rollout, but it is also the one that matters most.

If you would like to learn more about how I work with organisations that want to work well with AI, please get in touch. I'd love to hear from you.

Niamh