New data suggest that artificial intelligence is having an unexpected impact in the workplace. Workforce analytics firm ActivTrak looked at the digital work activity of 164,000 people and found that AI actually made their workloads more intense. Workers spent more time on email and messaging apps, and 9% less time on focused work like problem-solving. What's likely happening is that "the capacity [the AI] frees up immediately gets repurposed into doing other work," says ActivTrak's Gabriela Mauch. The study is one of the largest to date exploring AI's influence on work habits.

AI Is Making You Work More, Not Less — Here's How to Push Back

New research shows AI is intensifying workloads across the board. But you don't have to let it.

When AI tools started entering the workplace, the promise was clear: machines would handle the grunt work, and you'd finally have time to think, create, and breathe. For many workers, that vision has collided hard with reality.

New data from workforce analytics company ActivTrak — covering more than 164,000 workers and 443 million hours of work — tells a very different story. AI isn't reducing workloads. In most cases, it's making them heavier. Workers who adopted AI tools saw their time on email, messaging, and chat apps more than double. Their use of business management software shot up 94%. And the time they spent on deep, focused work — the kind needed for complex problem-solving and real creativity — actually fell by 9%.

So what's going on? And more importantly, what can you do about it?

"It's not that AI doesn't create efficiency. It's that the capacity it frees up immediately gets repurposed into doing other work." — Gabriela Mauch, ActivTrak

Why AI Makes Work Expand, Not Shrink

The phenomenon has a name: work creep. When you finish a task faster, the instinct — yours, your manager's, or your organization's — is often to fill that reclaimed time with more tasks rather than less work. AI has essentially raised the ceiling on how much any one person can produce, and employers and workers alike are racing to reach it.

Researchers studying a 200-person tech company over eight months found that AI tools led workers to take on broader scopes of work, move at faster paces, and log more hours overall — not fewer. A Berkeley professor leading that research put it plainly: AI makes additional tasks feel easy and accessible, creating a sense of momentum that's hard to resist. You finish one thing and immediately feel ready to take on three more.

AI agents compound the problem in a particularly sneaky way. They don't just help you do what you planned — they suggest expansions. They ask, 'Do you want me to consider this angle too?' or layer on five additional considerations you hadn't thought of. Before you know it, a 30-minute task has become a two-hour deep dive, and somehow it feels efficient the whole time.

The Real Risk: Cognitive Overload and Burnout

Higher output in the short run can look like a win on a spreadsheet. But there's a cost accumulating beneath the surface. When people work faster, on more things, with less time for sustained, uninterrupted thought, the brain pays a price.

Researchers warn that this pattern — more tasks, faster pace, less focus — leads over time to cognitive overload, declining decision quality, and burnout. You may appear more productive to your employer while quietly making worse decisions, missing nuance, and feeling chronically exhausted. The irony is brutal: the tool that was supposed to free your mind may actually be colonizing it.

This isn't a reason to ditch AI. It's a reason to use it intentionally — on your terms.

The workers who showed the highest productivity gains used AI tools for 7–10% of their total work hours. Most workers currently use them for just 1%. The sweet spot isn't maximum AI use — it's thoughtful AI use.

How to Use AI Without Letting It Use You

The good news is that you have more agency here than it might feel like. Here are practical ways to work with AI without letting it quietly balloon your workload:

1. Set the scope before you start. Before opening an AI tool, define exactly what you need from it. A clear output goal — 'I need a draft of this email' or 'I need three headline options' — stops you from following AI suggestions down rabbit holes that expand the task beyond its original purpose.

2. Treat AI efficiency as banked time, not bonus capacity. When AI saves you 30 minutes on a task, make a deliberate choice about where that time goes. If you don't decide, someone else will — usually by filling it with more work. Block the time. Use it for strategic thinking, recovery, or actual rest.

3. Say no to AI-generated scope creep. When your AI assistant asks 'Should I also consider X?' the answer doesn't have to be yes. Get comfortable treating those prompts as optional invitations, not instructions. You're the one responsible for your time — not the model.

4. Protect your deep work time. The ActivTrak data shows focused, uninterrupted work declining for AI users. That's worth fighting back against. Schedule blocks of time for complex thinking where AI tools — and notifications — are off-limits. Your best work still comes from you.

5. Have the conversation with your manager. If AI tools are making your role feel unbounded — always more to do, always more possible — that's worth naming openly. Frame it around sustainable output and decision quality, not just your own comfort. Managers who understand the burnout risk are better positioned to protect their teams from it.

What to Expect from Employers

Workers shouldn't have to navigate this alone. The research suggests that organizations rushing to maximize AI-driven output are setting themselves up for a wave of burnout, attrition, and degraded work quality. Smart employers will start building guardrails: reasonable expectations around AI-assisted workloads, clearer boundaries on what 'done' looks like, and cultures that reward quality over quantity.

If your organization isn't there yet, advocate for it. Share the research. Point to the long-term costs of cognitive overload. And in the meantime, take responsibility for your own boundaries — because in the age of AI, nobody else is going to set them for you.

AI is a remarkable tool. It genuinely does create efficiency. But efficiency is only valuable if it goes somewhere good — toward better work, more rest, clearer thinking, or deeper creativity. Right now, for most workers, those gains are being quietly absorbed into more work before anyone has a chance to notice.

You don't have to accept that. Use AI intentionally, protect your time fiercely, and remember: the goal was never to do more. The goal was to do better.