INSIDE AI: AI Isn’t Making Us Stupid. It’s Exposing How We Work.

There’s a growing narrative that AI is making us less capable at work: outsourcing our thinking, weakening our skills, and lowering the bar for what good work looks like.

It’s an easy argument to believe. We’ve all seen examples of people using AI poorly, asking it to do basic thinking, generate surface-level outputs, or shortcut effort entirely. From the outside, it looks like we’re offloading our thinking.

But that’s not what I’m seeing in practice. If anything, the opposite is happening. AI isn’t making us stupid. It’s changing what kind of work fills our day. And for many people, that shift feels like something has gone wrong.

Work Didn’t Get Longer. It Got Heavier.

For years, a significant portion of knowledge work was made up of low-cognitive, high-time tasks—administrative work, formatting, coordination, documentation. Necessary, but not particularly demanding.

AI is exceptionally good at eliminating that layer of work.

What it replaces it with is something very different: more strategic thinking, more creative problem-solving, more decision-making. Higher value work—but also higher effort.

We didn’t lose work. We lost the easy parts of work. And in their place, we now have more sustained periods of cognitively demanding work than most people—and most organizations—are structured to handle.

Why It Feels Like We’re Getting Worse

When people say AI is making work more “intense,” they’re not wrong. But they’re often misdiagnosing why. The intensity isn’t coming from AI doing too much thinking for us. It’s coming from us doing more of the hard thinking.

When you replace hours of low-effort work with sustained high-effort cognitive work, it doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like exhaustion.

It’s the equivalent of going from occasional workouts to training six days a week—with no adjustment period and no recovery built in. Of course it feels unsustainable. Because it is, if nothing else changes.

AI Didn’t Break Work. It Exposed It.

The real issue isn’t that AI is increasing intensity. It’s that organizations haven’t redesigned work around that shift. Instead, they’ve layered AI on top of existing structures, expectations, and workflows, and assumed everything else would hold.

It won’t. This pattern isn’t new.

The Innovation Blame Cycle

When organizations don’t redesign work, they don’t blame themselves. They blame the tool.We saw it with remote work. Leaders argued that employees were less productive, less engaged, harder to manage. The assumption was that something about the structure itself was broken.

But the data—and the people actually doing the work—told a different story. Many employees were working more hours, with more focused time, and producing more output.

The problem wasn’t remote work. It was that organizations didn’t redesign work for it. Now we’re seeing the same cycle with AI.

AI is framed as the issue—making people less capable, more dependent, less thoughtful. But again, the reality is more nuanced. People aren’t doing less. What they’re doing (and how it’s done) is fundamentally changing.

The Real Driver of Intensity: Expectation Creep

AI introduces efficiency. And in most organizations, efficiency doesn’t reduce work, but redefines expectations. Time saved is immediately reinvested.

Two hours of administrative work disappears, and it’s replaced with two hours of higher-level, more cognitively demanding work. On paper, the workload is the same. In practice, it’s completely different.

Any time saved by AI is immediately reinvested into higher expectations, unless leaders intervene. That’s where the real intensity comes from. Not longer days. Heavier ones.

Not All Intensity Is a Problem

It’s important to be clear: this shift isn’t inherently negative.

More strategic work. More creative ownership. More time spent on high-value thinking.

This is exactly what AI is supposed to enable. In many ways, it’s pushing people toward the most meaningful and impactful parts of their roles. The problem isn’t intensity. It’s unmanaged intensity.

The goal isn’t less intensity, but sustainable intensity. And that requires something most organizations haven’t done yet.

Where Organizations Are Getting It Wrong

AI isn’t a simple tooling upgrade. It’s a structural shift in how work happens. But most organizations are treating it like a feature rollout instead of a transformation. They aren’t:

• Redesigning roles around higher cognitive work
• Resetting expectations for output and pace
• Training employees on how to use AI effectively
• Adjusting performance metrics to reflect different kinds of work
• Building in recovery to match increased cognitive demand
  

Instead, they’re adding AI into existing systems and expecting better outcomes. This isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a change management failure.

What Intentional AI Implementation Looks Like

If organizations want AI to actually improve work—not just intensify it—they need to approach it differently. That means:

• Designing roles around cognitive load, not just output
• Treating efficiency gains as an opportunity to rebalance work—not just increase expectations
• Building in space for recovery alongside higher-intensity work
• Training employees to use AI as a tool for amplification, not substitution
• Rethinking what productivity actually means in a higher-cognitive environment

This is the same lesson we learned with remote work. The future of work isn’t about where work happens. And it’s not about what tools we use. It’s about how intentionally we design human energy within those systems.

AI Isn’t Making Us Stupid

AI isn’t making us less capable. It’s concentrating our work into the most cognitively demanding parts of what we do. And when organizations don’t redesign work to support that shift, it doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like failure.

But it’s not. It’s exposure.

AI didn’t create burnout. It revealed how poorly we design work.