The world’s capitalists have been waiting with bated breath for the day AI finally delivers on the tech industry’s longstanding promise to create a tool more efficient than human workers.
In the four years since AI first became broadly available as a commercial product, these productivity returns have mostly failed to materialize. Now, there’re signs that the push to automate labor is actually backfiring in ironic fashion, as workers who’ve been forced to adopt AI tools are becoming less efficient as time goes on.
A new analysis published by the workplace surveillance company ActivTrak, first covered by Gizmodo, found that white collar workers who use AI put in up to 90 minutes more work each day compared to non-users.
To arrive at that blistering number, company analysts looked at anonymized work activity from over 9,100 employees at over 450 companies from the period between April and September. For non-AI users observed over that time, the average active workday was 7.6 hours — compared to between 8.4 and 9.1 hours for heavy AI users.
For workers, the findings may add to the body of evidence suggesting that sorting through AI-generated slop takes more time than it would to just do workplace tasks by hand. It could also point to the fact that employers aren’t necessarily using AI to replace jobs wholesale, but as an excuse to demand even more labor per worker regardless of any true efficiency gains.
From a management point of view, the findings suggest that heavy AI users are having to spend extra billable time working after hours, while experiencing a higher frequency of interrupted work than light- or non-AI users.
As head of ActivTrak’s productivity research division Gabriela Mauch wrote in the company’s press report, AI “may help employees complete tasks faster, but our research shows it contributes to longer workdays, more application switching and shorter focus sessions.”
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