As AI adoption in the workplace accelerates, many people find themselves in a position where babysitting bots and agents is a significant part of their day. Those people are feeling a bit like AI has fried their brains.
Take it from anyone who's ever worked in management: Humans can be dumb, lazy, solve problems in obtuse and circuitous manners, and generally be a pain to wrangle, leading to exhaustion in the best of circumstances. Give every one of those humans a team of obtuse, difficult-to-wrangle AI bots, researchers from Boston Consulting Group discovered, and the problem multiplies.
According to the BCG group's findings published in the Harvard Business Review, AI's promise as an efficiency-driving, work-simplifying agent of liberation for workers hasn't quite panned out.
Instead, workers are being pushed to create their own teams of AI bots to perform mundane tasks – work which used to be the bread and butter of those human workers. Overeeing those agents is leading to a sort of exhaustion the team has termed "AI brain fry."
According to the survey, which included 1,488 full-time US workers, 14 percent (around 208) agreed that they had experienced AI brain fry as defined in the study. While a small percentage, it still suggests that there's yet an additional cognitive drawback to using AI that we haven't really thought about.
It's just like being exhausted from any other intense cognitive task, as the authors define it, saying AI brain fry is "mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity." Survey respondents described symptoms of brain fog, difficulty focusing, headaches, and slowed decisionmaking. Some felt as if they had to physically step away from their computer to "reset," they told the authors.
AI brain fry is distinct from burnout, which the BCG team defined as including "physical and emotional dimensions of distress" that aren't part of this particular problem. This is just plain old exhaustion - probably a lot like what managers of humans experience having to deal with team drama constantly, exacerbated by sitting in one place and staring at a screen for hours on end.
And that fatigue isn't just a feeling - the BCG team said that self-reported error rates among those who felt they were using too much AI were 39 percent higher, meaning businesses are suffering for putting too much on employees' shoulders.
The thing most cited as mentally taxing wasn't using AI, but overseeing AI tools and agents that worked semi-autonomously. Those who reported having to maintain a high degree of AI oversight reported spending 14 percent more mental energy in the workplace, being 12 percent more mentally fatigued, and were 19 percent more likely to say they suffer from information overload in the workplace.
In terms of job roles, marketers are the most likely to report AI brain fry, followed by HR, ops, engineering, finance, and IT. All those departments, you might note, are particularly prone to AI disruption and the proliferation of agents doing things like writing copy, crunching numbers, and dealing with support tickets.
There's also a clear limit to how big a supervisor can expect an employee's AI toolbox to get: Employees who used a single AI tool and reported adding a second reported a significant increase in productivity. But "as they incorporate a third tool, productivity again increases, but at a lower rate," the team said. "After three tools, though, productivity scores dipped."
BCG expert partner and director Gabriella Kellerman, one of the study's authors, explained that multi-agent systems are increasing in prevalence and that she expects that the number of employees experiencing AI brain fry will increase > unless leaders start to correct the problem now while the heavy-using AI cohort is still small.
"For workers using AI most intensively, this data is an early call for leaders to continue investing in redesigning work," Kellerman told The Register. "Not many workers are using AI this intensively yet, so the number is appropriate for this early stage," Kellerman said in an email, adding that "without a holistic approach to equipping employees with proper training and manager support, AI brain fry has the potential to become a bigger concern."
There are some uses of AI that weren't as likely to cause brain fry, and could even help relieve symptoms of burnout.
Those able to use AI to offload repetitive, dull, and routine tasks reported feeling 15 percent less burned out, as well as "reporting higher work engagement and motivation scores; more positive emotional associations with AI; and fewer negative emotional associations with AI than others."
Teams who've integrated AI into their processes tend to overall show fewer signs of brain fry, as do those with clear AI training and strategies.
"Our findings suggest that the difference ... is not how much AI an individual uses, but how workers, teams, leaders, and organizations shape its use," BCG said.
"This is a leadership challenge, not just one for individual contributors," Kellerman said. Successful leaders, she added, were those who were available and willing to actively address AI concerns had much more successful, less stressed teams for their efforts. ®
Source: The register