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When Jessica, who works in media, was having concerns about one of her writers, she went to her own manager for help. This writer didn’t seem to know some of the basic skills of their role, but Jessica’s manager had a solution: Had she tried asking ChatGPT?
This was not the first time Jessica’s manager had made this suggestion. In fact, it was becoming difficult to remember the last time her manager had actually answered any question herself. If she wasn’t instructing others to ask ChatGPT, she was doing it on her own—for workplace issues, editorial decisions, and even Jessica’s annual review. (Jessica, like everyone else quoted in this story, requested that her name be changed to protect her privacy.) “It’s like she’s trying to turn her brain off,” Jessica told me.
A.I. use at work has nearly doubled in the past few years, especially in white-collar industries. Although a Gallup poll found that 44 percent of employees say their organizations have begun integrating A.I. into their workflow, only 22 percent note that there has been a strategy for doing so, and even less have found any value in it. Yet bosses, according to many I spoke to for this story, can’t get enough—resulting in a lot more work and headaches for everyone involved.
“I’ve seen it used for everything: Completely rewriting press releases that were written by actual humans, deciding on brand partners based on what A.I. says, giving feedback, coming up with creative ideas or copywriting and not changing them at all,” Derek, who works in the food industry, told me. “Anything you can think of, the leaders have used it for.”
Employees across sectors ranging from law to marketing to academia told me this enthusiasm often isn’t backed up by a thorough understanding of the tools. They’ll ask questions and be sent back a link to their boss’s conversation with ChatGPT, which sometimes loads nothing. “I got feedback to be more concise at work, yet am routinely sent copypasta from ChatGPT that is literally the longest shit known to man,” said Mel, who works in finance. “I can’t read it.” As a result, the work of deciphering—and sometimes fixing—a boss’s A.I. effort becomes an additional task on an employee’s plate.
Jessica, for instance, did ask ChatGPT what to do about her direct report—and it suggested she send them to journalism school. Instead, she went to the company’s HR department, which, she says, shared more actionable advice. Another employee I spoke to, who works in the legal industry, was instructed to run her ideas through A.I. before coming to her boss. But bots often fail to grasp basic facts, such as insisting that the ratio 1:100 simplifies to 1:25. “It absolutely takes me more time to attempt to extract a useful answer from A.I. than it would take for [my manager] to just give me a two-minute answer to whatever I’m asking him to weigh in on,” they said.
It would be easy to conclude that this is merely a case of managers using A.I. to do less work, but many employees have noticed something puzzling: Their managers seem more burned out than ever. “As much as I think I get 10 people’s worth of work done daily, it’s only ramped up the expectations,” a solutions architect who works in the tech industry told me.
While A.I.’s selling point is its ability to quickly take care of otherwise-time-consuming tasks, the Harvard Business Review recently found that this feature only ends up intensifying employee workload, not reducing it. Maintaining a faster pace to tackle more tasks results in longer workdays. It’s not hard to imagine this “workload creep” leading managers to outsource even more of their tasks to A.I. to account for it.
But employees like Derek aren’t quite as generous with their diagnosis: “They are getting cavities in their brains.”
Two things may be true: A.I. is putting unsustainable pressure on managers, and an overreliance on A.I. is causing previously standard skills to atrophy. “She isn’t used to making independent decisions anymore,” Jessica said of her manager. “So day-to-day stuff becomes way more overwhelming and high stakes than it needs to be.”
Unless organizations develop clear strategies, A.I. in the workplace becomes a bull in a china shop—with those who never even wanted it tasked with cleaning up the mess. Until then, it’s easier for some to just opt out entirely. “As always,” the legal employee battling the chatbot said, “I ended up just using my real, actual brain.”
