There's a story most of us lived through without realizing it.
In the 1990s, email was supposed to make life easier. For a moment, it did. Then the inbox that once held a dozen messages started holding a hundred. Evenings stopped being evenings. Sundays stopped being Sundays. Nobody decided this would happen. It just became normal, quietly, one unanswered message at a time.
Email didn't just change how we worked. It changed how much work was acceptable to demand from a human being.
AI is running the same play. And most of us are still in the part of the story where it feels like a gift.
Right now, AI feels like a superpower. You write faster, research in minutes what used to take hours, and produce more with less visible effort. For a while, that feels genuinely great.
But Harvard Business Review followed real workers at a real company for eight months and found something they called workload creep. Workers moved faster, so expectations rose. Higher expectations meant more reliance on AI, more reliance meant wider scope, and wider scope meant more work. The cycle fed itself with no natural stopping point.
A 2024 Upwork study of 2,500 workers confirmed it. 77% said AI had increased their workload, not reduced it. Most felt busier than before. Not freer. Busier.
Think about the last time you said you couldn't do something because it wasn't your area. That exit is quietly closing.
Once a tool exists that can help you draft a legal clause or analyse a dataset, the assumption shifts. You have the tool, so you have the capability. You have the capability, so you have the responsibility. One day you're just expected to do things that used to belong to someone who trained for years to do them well.
Speed without real expertise produces errors that look fine until they don't. An invoice goes out wrong, a client gets billed twice, and the correction takes three weeks and a strained relationship to fix. There's often no one around to catch what slips through.
Burnout doesn't arrive in one breaking moment. It builds in the slow creep of a hundred small yeses. Yes to the extra project. Yes to the faster turnaround. Yes to work that used to require hiring someone. Each decision makes sense on its own. Together they become a weight no one planned to carry.
Burnout rates are at record highs, and the people least affected are consistently the ones at the top, the same people raising the bar.
AI will make everything feel possible. That feeling is exactly what makes it dangerous. The boundary no one else will set for you is the one you have to defend yourself.
References:
Upwork Research Institute – Employee Workloads Rising Despite Increased C-Suite Investment in Artificial Intelligence (2024)
Aruna Ranganathan & Xingqi Maggie Ye – AI Doesn't Reduce Work, It Intensifies It – Harvard Business Review (2026)
