AI Is Boosting Productivity—but Data Shows Employee Workloads Are Getting Heavier

Companies have been rapidly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools with the expectation that the task automating apps will lighter staff workloads, free people up for other, more valuable activities — and possibly take over certain jobs entirely. But a new study finds that while AI is delivering some of the benefits businesses expected, it’s also significantly the increasing intensity and scope of employees’ work, and stoking the threat of burnout as a result.

That’s the top finding of the 2026 State of the Workplace report by employee analytics and intelligence company ActivTrak. Its analysis of over 443 million hours of work activity across 1,111 organizations revealed that adoption rates of AI tools in businesses surged from 53 percent two years ago to 80 percent in 2025. That helped increase the number of productive employee hours last year by 5 percent, even as the average workday length decreased by 2 percent.  At the same time, as apps automated certain job tasks, they created new kinds of work that compounded, intensified, and sped up the pace of staff workloads.

In other words, while the task automating tech is fulfilling some of the efficiency and productivity promises its developers predicted, its also causing — and at times forcing — employees who use it to take on more work elsewhere.

“Despite expectations that AI would reduce workloads, the findings show otherwise: AI is amplifying work activity across nearly every category measured,” said ActivTrak’s summary of the study’s findings. “After AI adoption, time spent across work applications increased between 27 percent and 346 percent, including a 104 percent increase in email, a 145 percent increase in chat and messaging and a 94 percent rise in business management tools. Meanwhile, AI users’ average daily focused time declined 23 minutes.”

That runs counter to expectations of AI taking over repetitive, uninspiring, and often lower-value tasks from employees who could use the time saved to work on more creative, strategic, and productive work. Instead, apps are often just packing additional new duties into users’ workdays.

Some of that is a direct result of how AI tools now operate. Apps will frequently ask users for further input or direction as they complete tasks. They also may repeatedly prompt employees for guidance on decisions the tool isn’t able to make on its own.

Another labor-intensifying consequence of those AI assistants, the study said, is they often require workers to use additional apps to complete associated tasks — or complete those manually. That sets off a process of proliferating multitasking that further intensifies people’s workloads and can lead to burnout.

And don’t even mention time required to clean up AI slop. One recent study determined mopping up that mess of “slick slides, lengthy reports, overly tightened summaries, or code without context” takes employees an average two hours per week. That in turn costs their employers of $186 in lost time and productivity per month — or $9 million annually for a company with 10,000 workers.