Source: Fortune
Summary
Research from GoTo and Workplace Intelligence found that AI adoption is intensifying work, not reducing it. Employees save over 2 hours per day using AI tools, but 60% feel pressured to use AI to boost productivity, and 50% say they rely on it too much. The productivity gain and human performance cost are arriving simultaneously. Organizations are only tracking one of them.
Our Reading
The numbers tell one story.
AI compresses timelines, and speed becomes the proxy for performance. Leaders report strongest gains, while individual contributors remain the least likely to receive guidance on how to use AI effectively. The bar is rising, and the measurement framework is not keeping pace. Employees are evaluated primarily on how fast they produce, and the invisible cognitive labor goes unrecognized and eventually exhausted.
The downstream consequence is what researchers are calling workslop: fast-output, low-value work that floods organizations when speed is the only thing being measured. What makes this dynamic so difficult to address is that it compounds quietly, and leaders are not reporting the simultaneous increase in cognitive load, decline in focused work time, or erosion of judgment quality.
The cycle nobody is interrupting is the acceleration of adoption while underinvesting in human infrastructure required to sustain it. The metrics that look good in a presentation get elevated, and the metrics that would reveal the human cost have not been built yet.
The strategy enters a familiar phase: treating every efficiency gain as an invitation to pile on more work.
Author: Evan Null
