When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry”
AI use can lead to burnout - but how you use it really matters.
Interesting research about the interaction between AI use and burnout, studying 1488 (an incidentally unfortunate number) US-based workers. Burnout is real:
“Participants described a “buzzing” feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches. This AI-associated mental strain carries significant costs in the form of increased employee errors, decision fatigue, and intention to quit.
There’s some nuance here, however. We also found when AI is used to replace routine or repetitive tasks, burnout scores—but not mental fatigue scores—are lower. This highlights the subtle-but-important distinction between the types of stress that AI can alleviate, and those that it may worsen.”
So the kind of AI use matters. The researchers found that AI use cases that required increased oversight (coding is one, using AI with sensitive internal data is another) increased the risk of burnout. This was particularly true because the people who used these tools were more likely to take on more work, pushing their total cognitive load beyond their limits. But using it for more straightforward repetitive tasks reduced the risk of burnout.
The high-risk activities cluster around certain teams:
“After marketing, people operations, operations, engineering, finance, and IT were the functions with the highest prevalence of AI brain fry.”
Legal teams, who presumably use AI on evidence sets and on contract analysis using tools like Harvey but not their actual legal analysis, were the least likely to suffer from this problem.
This should inform how managers think about AI use and how to set humane norms internally.
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