Opinion: AI gave me what I wanted

Jarad Johnson

Last week, I was staring at my screen as three artificial intelligence agents were running. One was building a new feature for our CRM, another was putting together research before a client meeting and the third was handling a SKU database migration.

I was watching a lot of work being done, but I wasn’t doing any of it.

My task, the one I couldn’t hand to the AI, was a people problem. One of those cognitively and emotionally taxing tasks where there are no shortcuts. And I couldn’t start on it. It had been an intense day and my brain was mush. I had plenty of time to take on that task, but my mental load for the day had been maxed out.

I spend my days moving between strategy and training sessions, client projects, leadership decisions and technical problems. I’ve been using generative AI tools daily since 2022 (if you’re ever in earshot of me, you probably already know that). Over that time, I’ve built systems that take over a significant portion of what used to fill my days. I used to dread writing yet another proposal from an existing template or researching dozens of articles to validate or invalidate a hunch or creating detailed spec docs from meeting notes and whiteboard images. That’s all work that I hated but could do in my sleep.

I hated it precisely because I could do it in my sleep. So, when it was taken by my AI assistant, I didn’t miss it much. I wanted to spend my time on the hard stuff, the strategy, complex problem solving and high-level thinking that actually moves the company forward. And I got what I wanted.

What I didn’t expect was how exhausting it would be to get what I wanted.

Expertise researcher K. Anders Ericsson spent decades studying top performers across fields. His finding, published in Psychological Review and replicated across disciplines, shows that humans can sustain roughly four hours of truly demanding cognitive work per day. Not eight. Not six. Four. Elite performers don’t push past that ceiling. They protect it with rest, recovery and lighter activity between sessions.

For most of us, the workday was never eight hours of hard thinking. It was a few hours of deep focus mixed with hours of lighter tasks that required less mental effort. And we turned those lighter tasks into cognitive breathing room.

AI is stripping that breathing room away and it can be suffocating.

A February study from University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business tracked this dynamic inside a tech company over eight months. The researchers found that AI didn’t reduce workload. It intensified it. Workers expanded their scope, filled freed time with harder tasks and let work bleed into breaks, lunches and evenings because AI made everything feel quick enough to get done. The natural stopping points disappeared.

One participant captured it clearly: “You had thought that maybe because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index tells the same story from the other side. They found that 90% of AI users say it saves them time and 85% percent say it helps them focus on important work. At the same time, 68% percent say they struggle with the pace and volume of their workload and 46% percent report feeling burned out. People love these tools and some are still drowning.

I’d consider myself a pretty hard worker and I’m still one of them. After a full day of moving from one complex problem to the next with no filler between, I’m more mentally exhausted than I’ve ever been. The dangerous kind of exhaustion where I realize I don’t have much left for my family.

The question this raises isn’t whether businesses should adopt AI. They should. The question is what happens to workload design when the easy work disappears. If a team used to spend half their day on tasks that required moderate effort and half on tasks that required intense focus, and AI eliminates the moderate half, do we expect eight hours of intense focus? Or do we rethink what a productive day looks like?

Companies are moving faster because of these tools. But faster doesn’t mean sustainable. As we embrace the good, we have to look up from our screens and decide how we want this to work. Because it’s here.

Jarad Johnson is the CEO and co-founder of Mostly Serious LLC. He can be reached at jarad@mostlyserious.io.