If you’ve ever used an online patient portal to message your doctor in the middle of the night, you won’t be surprised to learn that responding to those messages takes an increasingly big bite out of clinicians’ workdays.
So in 2023, hospitals began adopting an AI tool that would draft responses for them. The tool was supposed to make a time-consuming task go faster, said Philip Barrison, an MD-PhD student at the University of Michigan Medical School who studies AI in healthcare.
Instead, the tool has given doctors and nurses a new to-do list. They have to decide if its response is something they would say, then they have to edit it before sending it to a patient. The AI tool introduces a totally new set of complicated judgment calls into what used to be a relatively straightforward process.
Workplaces across the country are seeing similar changes. Buoyed by expectations of cost savings and skyrocketing productivity, companies are increasingly asking (and sometimes requiring) employees to use AI to make their work more efficient.
Meta, for example, last year instructed some workers to use AI to “go 5X faster by eliminating the frictions that slow us down.” The CEO of Shopify told employees they’d need to prove they “cannot get what they want done using AI” before the company would approve new hires. Some companies are even evaluating or ranking employees based on how much they use AI tools.
Corporations are increasingly presenting employees with a choice: Use AI to be more productive or “you’re going to be automated out of a job,” said Aiha Nguyen, director of the labor futures program at the research organization Data & Society. But the effects of AI on productivity aren’t as straightforward as some CEOs have claimed.
Does AI really make workers more productive?
In one 2025 study, software developers believed AI made them faster, but in fact they took 19 percent longer to complete tasks. And in a recent survey of 5,000 white-collar workers, 40 percent of rank-and-file employees said AI saved them no time at all.
Workers across heavily AI-exposed fields point to hidden timesucks that come with using the technology, such as editing or fact-checking the content AI generates. And it’s not just that AI makes errors. With the advent of agentic AI, workers are increasingly being asked to edit and oversee the output of multiple AI tools.
One recent study of 1,488 workers found that excessive oversight of AI agents could lead to “AI brain fry,” a kind of cognitive fatigue that is associated with increased errors.
What workers want from AI
Some workers and organizations are beginning to push back. National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses’ union, has criticized the use of AI tools in hospitals to estimate staffing needs or to recommend treatment protocols for patients.
There’s no guarantee that these tools will take into account a patient’s individual profile the way a human clinician can, said Cathy Kennedy, the union’s president. AI is supposed to “help us do our work more efficiently, but at the end of the day, it makes it even more burdensome,” she said.
Some workers have found ways that AI actually helps them do their work — just not the ones management expected. Meanwhile, researchers have found that AI can reduce employee burnout, if it’s used to complete tasks employees find burdensome.
“Everybody in every job has a list of things that they procrastinate on,” said Julie Bedard, a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group who led the AI brain fry study. “Those are the places I get, unsurprisingly, a lot of enthusiasm to try AI with.”
But employers won’t uncover those burdensome tasks unless they listen to employees. “Worker standards and worker rights should continue to be at the heart of all of this,” Nguyen said, “rather than just focusing too much on the AI.”
Read Anna’s full piece here.
