Every company seems willing to embrace AI, but the benefits may not have a long shelf life. After “the start of productivity,” workers using AI reported more intense work days and work-life balance, and produced lower quality work overall, according to ongoing research first published this week in the Harvard Business Review.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, studied the habits and behaviors of about 200 people who used generative AI in their work at a technology company for eight months. The company offered employees enterprise-grade subscriptions to AI products. Workers weren’t required to use AI, but many workers did. What happens next is exactly what AI companies hope will happen: AI workers work faster and take on more responsibilities. But there have been unintended consequences that show the limitations of current AI tools used in the workplace.
One of the biggest selling points of AI in the workplace is that it can help employees manage tasks that may have been outside of their expertise or skill set. Non-developers, for example, can now add vibe code to almost any project. The workers in the study did this, taking on work that could have been delegated or avoided, the authors noted. So workers inadvertently create more work for themselves, put more on their plates and struggle to balance it all.
Read more: Is AI Putting Jobs at Risk? A Recent Survey Finds Significant Differences
We also know that AI as a career hack has no downside. AI results are rarely ready to go without being reviewed by a real person. A September 2025 study found that workers spend hours each week dealing with their colleagues and their AI work that is poor or full of errors, sometimes called “workslop.” A 2025 business report from OpenAI said workers save an average of just 40 to 60 minutes a week, with more time threatened by AI power users.
That time saved by AI may not have made a measurable difference to work-life balance. The workers in the UC Berkeley study actually end up working long hours. AI’s always-on and easy-to-use nature made it easy for them to run a query on their lunch break or ask a quick question after logging in.
Even when employees felt like they had a digital partner, their mental workloads didn’t really decrease, and they were still expected to deliver results faster because they were using AI to help. That’s why UC Berkeley researchers say AI is more likely to “intensify” work than reduce it.
Authors Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye offer culture-focused solutions and practices that companies can use to prevent AI-induced burnout. These include protecting human interaction time, prioritizing quality results over speed, and ensuring that employees block focus time without AI disruption. Being intentional about the use of AI — both inside and outside of work — is one of the best ways to prevent misuse and create work that isn’t sloppy.
Across industries, workers are concerned that the advancement of AI will end their jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said that AI could lead to “extraordinarily painful” temporary disruptions for employees. And the recent spate of thousands of layoffs at Amazon was apparently done because the company expected AI to fill the gaps and help remaining workers do more with fewer resources. But we’ve seen enough evidence that while AI can help you do some jobs, it’s unlikely to fill perfect roles in many industries.
