Is AI generating more work for you, not less?

At a recent event I asked a People and Culture Manager what was the biggest issue they were facing right now. Their answer surprised me: 'I'm overwhelmed with the work I'm doing in Copilot.'

I'd not heard this before, so we spent the next fifteen minutes on it. In short, their gripes were these:

- They were being asked to do more of their existing job through AI, even for tasks that never needed it, like process redesign. But the prompts had to be precise, and everything AI produced had to be constantly checked, so the job took twice as long. A doom loop of never-ending AI work.

- They were being asked to do things they'd never done before. The example they gave was designing and building internal intranet pages, previously someone else's job. No training was offered, they were simply told to teach themselves to 'vibe code'.

- They were now checking every job application for 'AI inconsistencies' - the tell-tale signs a candidate had let AI write it for them - which doubled the time each one took. I joked about whether they could use AI to do that. This was a mistake!

None of this is a technology problem per se, it's a leadership one. Someone has handed this person a stack of unfamiliar tasks, offered no support, and wrapped the lot in a productivity/efficiency story they're expected to swallow, without question. 

As I've written before, cultural readiness i.e. training, leaders modelling the behaviour, permission to be a beginner, is what might make AI work. If you skip it, the chances of burning people out will definitely increase.

We're still being promised that the tools will improve, and no doubt they will. But for now this particular one has quietly handed a single person a second full-time job, supervising a confident, tireless colleague who is often wrong and rarely learns when corrected.