Harvard study reveals AI brain fry: Workers face mental fatigue managing multiple AI tools

Harvard Business Review Study Finds 'AI Brain Fry' Is Leaving Workers Mentally Fatigued

Expertise Video gaming, computer hardware, laptops, home energy, home internet Workers who excessively use AI agents and tools at work are at increased risk of mental fatigue, according to a recent Harvard Business Review study. In certain industries, more than 25% of hired professionals report increased mental strain due to their role in AI oversight -- though these professionals also generally experienced less burnout than peers who aren't using AI. This phenomenon -- which the researchers refer to as "AI brain fry" -- is described as a "'buzzing' feeling or a mental fog" that caused study participants to develop headaches and difficulty focusing and making decisions. Individuals pointed to being overwhelmed by large amounts of information and to frequent task switching as the reasons for these feelings. Studied individuals experienced more brain fry when they utilized AI agents to manage a workload beyond their own cognitive capacity. When participants used AI to replace mundane, repetitive tasks, managing the growing number of tools led to increased mental fatigue. Crucially, the study found that fewer individuals who used these AI agents reported workplace burnout. The researchers predict that this is because burnout testing assesses emotional and physical distress. In contrast, they report, acute mental fatigue "is caused by marshalling attention, working memory and executive control beyond the limited capacity of these systems." These are the processes that are taxed when study participants use multiple AI tools in their workflow, according to the researchers. The Harvard study identifies several business costs incurred by workers suffering from AI brain fry. The foremost consequence is that these individuals may end up making lower-quality decisions. "Workers in [the] study who endorsed AI brain fry experience 33% more decision fatigue than those who did not," the study reports. Workers who report AI brain fry were also more likely to self-report making both minor and major errors at their jobs. Another recent Harvard Business Review study similarly found that employees who use AI tools "worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks and extended work into more hours of the day," but warned that "workload creep can in turn lead to cognitive fatigue, burnout and weakened decision-making."

'AI brain fry' affects employees managing too many agents

As AI adoption in the workplace accelerates, many people find themselves in a position where babysitting bots and agents is a significant part of their day. Those people are feeling a bit like AI has fried their brains. Take it from anyone who's ever worked in management: Humans can be dumb, lazy, solve problems in obtuse and circuitous manners, and generally be a pain to wrangle, leading to exhaustion in the best of circumstances. Give every one of those humans a team of obtuse, difficult-to-wrangle AI bots, researchers from Boston Consulting Group discovered, and the problem multiplies. According to the BCG group's findings published in the Harvard Business Review, AI's promise as an efficiency-driving, work-simplifying agent of liberation for workers hasn't quite panned out. Instead, workers are being pushed to create their own teams of AI bots to perform mundane tasks - work which used to be the bread and butter of those human workers. Overeeing those agents is leading to a sort of exhaustion the team has termed "AI brain fry." According to the survey, which included 1,488 full-time US workers, 14 percent (around 208) agreed that they had experienced AI brain fry as defined in the study. While a small percentage, it still suggests that there's yet an additional cognitive drawback to using AI that we haven't really thought about. It's just like being exhausted from any other intense cognitive task, as the authors define it, saying AI brain fry is "mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity." Survey respondents described symptoms of brain fog, difficulty focusing, headaches, and slowed decisionmaking. Some felt as if they had to physically step away from their computer to "reset," they told the authors. AI brain fry is distinct from burnout, which the BCG team defined as including "physical and emotional dimensions of distress" that aren't part of this particular problem. This is just plain old exhaustion - probably a lot like what managers of humans experience having to deal with team drama constantly, exacerbated by sitting in one place and staring at a screen for hours on end. And that fatigue isn't just a feeling - the BCG team said that self-reported error rates among those who felt they were using too much AI were 39 percent higher, meaning businesses are suffering for putting too much on employees' shoulders. The thing most cited as mentally taxing wasn't using AI, but overseeing AI tools and agents that worked semi-autonomously. Those who reported having to maintain a high degree of AI oversight reported spending 14 percent more mental energy in the workplace, being 12 percent more mentally fatigued, and were 19 percent more likely to say they suffer from information overload in the workplace. In terms of job roles, marketers are the most likely to report AI brain fry, followed by HR, ops, engineering, finance, and IT. All those departments, you might note, are particularly prone to AI disruption and the proliferation of agents doing things like writing copy, crunching numbers, and dealing with support tickets. There's also a clear limit to how big a supervisor can expect an employee's AI toolbox to get: Employees who used a single AI tool and reported adding a second reported a significant increase in productivity. But "as they incorporate a third tool, productivity again increases, but at a lower rate," the team said. "After three tools, though, productivity scores dipped." BCG expert partner and director Gabriella Kellerman, one of the study's authors, explained that multi-agent systems are increasing in prevalence and that she expects that the number of employees experiencing AI brain fry will increase > unless leaders start to correct the problem now while the heavy-using AI cohort is still small. "For workers using AI most intensively, this data is an early call for leaders to continue investing in redesigning work," Kellerman told The Register. "Not many workers are using AI this intensively yet, so the number is appropriate for this early stage," Kellerman said in an email, adding that "without a holistic approach to equipping employees with proper training and manager support, AI brain fry has the potential to become a bigger concern." There are some uses of AI that weren't as likely to cause brain fry, and could even help relieve symptoms of burnout. Those able to use AI to offload repetitive, dull, and routine tasks reported feeling 15 percent less burned out, as well as "reporting higher work engagement and motivation scores; more positive emotional associations with AI; and fewer negative emotional associations with AI than others." Teams who've integrated AI into their processes tend to overall show fewer signs of brain fry, as do those with clear AI training and strategies. "Our findings suggest that the difference ... is not how much AI an individual uses, but how workers, teams, leaders, and organizations shape its use," BCG said. "This is a leadership challenge, not just one for individual contributors," Kellerman said. Successful leaders, she added, were those who were available and willing to actively address AI concerns had much more successful, less stressed teams for their efforts. ®

Amazon Employees Say AI Is Just Increasing Workload. A New Study Confirms Their Suspicions

For years, Silicon Valley has sold a utopian future to the world, in which all-powerful AI tools automate entire workflows, both freeing up time for burnt-out workers while maximizing profit for shareholders. Many companies across the American workforce subscribed to this vision. Artificial intelligence crept into the workplace as business leaders promised four-day workweeks and a true work-life balance in a business world where working overtime has become somewhat of a norm. Now, workers are saying that's not necessarily the reality they are facing. A group of Amazon corporate employees told The Guardian that the company's internal push for all employees to use "half-baked" AI tools was actually unhelpful and just added to their workload. The AI tools often make mistakes, which the workers then have to dig through and correct or consult with colleagues to verify results, according to the report. It all just adds up to the time they spend on each task and has been hurting productivity, the employees said. "I and many of my colleagues don't feel that it actually makes us that much faster," one software developer told the Guardian. "But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority." The experience isn't limited to Amazon employees. A recent survey showed that the vision to save time for workers via AI has proven to be a bit bogus across the economy. Workforce analytics company ActivTrak analyzed work activity across 163,638 employees in 1,111 organizations over three years, only to find that AI is actually increasing the average workload of employees. "The data is unambiguous: AI does not reduce workloads," the researchers wrote in a report. The AI users reported spending more time on every measured work category after AI adoption, with not a single work category showing any decrease. The number of emails a worker had to send was up 104%, chat and messaging was up 145%, and time spent with business management tools was up 94%. "AI is being used as an additional productivity layer, not a substitute for existing work," the report says. The ActivTrak survey paints a slightly different picture from the Amazon report. While Amazon employees reported that the AI tools did not decrease the time they spent doing a task, the survey did find that AI helped speed up some tasks and free up time. But the outcome was still the same: that "free time" was just filled up with even more work. The AI tools ultimately helped the company in its quest for more output, but didn't help the employee who is looking to ease her work burden. In a podcast last year, former Google executive Mo Gawdat spoke about this exact disconnect between the promised consequences and the reality of artificial intelligence and technological advancements overall. “How often did social media connect us, and how often did it make us more lonely? How often did mobile phones make us work less? That was the promise, the early ads of Nokia, where people had parties, is that your experience of mobile phones?†Gawdat said. The reason why, according to Gawdat, is that technology magnifies existing human abilities and values, and in this case, it's capitalism's relentless pursuit of profit.

AI 'brain fry' is real: Stress, fatigue, and errors, study shows

Productivity drops sharply when employees use four or more AI tools at once, highlighting the need for balanced AI implementation strategies. Using AI tools at work can make your job faster and easier, but if you use too many AI tools at once and/or rely too much on said AI tools, it can also make you mentally exhausted. According to a study published by Harvard Business Review titled "When Using AI Leads to 'Brain Fry'", researchers found evidence of a phenomenon they're calling "brain fry," which describes a sort of cognitive fatigue or mental exhaustion that comes from AI usage -- specifically, the oversight and management of AI tools. In a survey of 1,488 full-time US employees at large companies across industries, roles, and levels, researchers at the Boston Consulting Group and the University of California, Riverside found that participants who juggled oversight of multiple AI tools expended more mental effort, experienced greater mental fatigue, and were more likely to experience information overload. However, the researchers also emphasize that AI usage can help decrease the likelihood of burnout when it's used to automate routine tasks. The "brain fry" mainly occurs with the managerial oversight that's needed when dealing with many AI tools, leading to "an inability to think clearly, like a mental hangover, comprised of difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches, requiring several to physically step away from their computer to 'reset.'" According to the study, there's evidence that productivity drops once you start using 4 or more AI tools at once. When brain fry takes hold, productivity plummets due to accumulating decision fatigue, minor errors, stress, and burnout.

AI overuse could spark "brain fry," new research finds

Why it matters: The rapid adoption of AI in the workplace -- and the aggressive push from employers to use the technology -- is frying the minds of those who use it most intensely. Where it stands: The mental strain associated with AI carries "significant costs," researchers from Boston Consulting Group and University of California, Riverside write in an article just published in the Harvard Business Review. * Those include "increased employee errors, decision fatigue and intention to quit." Friction point: Researchers found that workers most at risk for brain fry are using multiple tools or overseeing multiple AI agents -- the early adopters and those most excited about the technology. * "One of the reasons we did this work is because we saw this happening to people who were perceived as really high performers," said Julie Bedard, a partner at BCG. By the numbers: They surveyed 1,488 full-time U.S.-based workers about their AI use. * 14% of those using AI said "yes" when asked if they had ever experienced "mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity." * That's "brain fry." * "Participants described a 'buzzing' feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making and headaches." "I had been back and forth with AI, reframing ideas, synthesizing data, forming and organizing the flow of pillars and work...I couldn't even comprehend if what I had created even made sense...just couldn't do anything else and had to revisit the next day when I could think," a finance director is quoted as saying in the piece. Between the lines: 14% doesn't seem like a big number, but it's a "warning sign," the report's authors say. * More employers are making AI use mandatory -- with some measuring use in performance reviews. That could be encouraging overuse. What to watch: Brain fry is different from burnout -- a state of chronic workplace stress that leads to exhaustion, negative feelings about work and decreased effectiveness, Bedard and coauthor Gabriella Kellerman, who did the earlier workslop report, tell Axios. * If AI is used to replace routine or repetitive tasks, it can reduce the phenomenon. * Employers need to be careful about introducing AI into workplaces -- there are ways to integrate it without leading to brain fry. The bottom line: Just because workers can keep iterating with AI, they write, "does not mean they should."

AI isn't reducing workloads for employees, it's straining them -- time spent on emailing has doubled, while deep-focus work has fallen by 9% | Fortune

Tech CEOs have lauded that AI will turn workers into "superhumans" where work is optional, and more time dedicated to innovating the world -- but so far, the opposite has been true for most. AI is actually increasing strain for most employees, as the tools add more time to menial tasks, and actually takes away from deep-focus work. Since adopting AI into their workflows, time spent across every job responsibility shot up anywhere from 27% to 346%, according to a recent ActivTrak report that analyzed 10,584 users 180 days before and after their AI adoption. The time spent toiling on grunt work like emails increased by 104%, while chatting and messaging climbed by 145%, and using business management tools rose 94%. There wasn't a single activity category where using AI actually saved users time, with the report reaffirming that: "The data is unambiguous: AI does not reduce workloads." Instead, professionals are now multitasking at a greater rate, and spending less of their days concentrating on complex problems. "The prevailing assumption about AI and modern work is that both make the workday lighter. Shorter. More manageable. AI handles repetitive tasks, collaboration tools reduce friction and employees do more with less effort," the ActivTrak report notes. "It's a compelling story. It's also not what the behavioral data shows." To fit these longer routine tasks in their workdays, employees have had to actually sacrifice deep-thinking time -- despite CEOs promising AI would increase it. The length of the average focused, uninterrupted work session fell by 9%, and focused work hours dropped by an additional 2%, according to the report. This is a continuation of a three-year downward trend, as the share of time spent "in the zone" fell to 60% in 2025. Tech leaders working fast to win the AI race have been spreading day-dreamy predictions about the future of the world. The CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, predicted that we're only four years away from a "golden era" of prosperity, where the tech will help us "colonize the galaxy" and make people "superhuman" in their roles. And xAI founder Elon Musk believes that traditional work will be completely voluntary in the next 10 to 15 years thanks to the new tools, likening jobs to a hobby. And if AI only continues to get better, even "money will stop being relevant." "My prediction is that work will be optional. It'll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that," Musk said at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington this year. "If you want to work, [it's] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard," he continued. "It's much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables." Leaders are even speculating that AI efficiency gains will be so great that workweeks will shorten across the board. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan predicts that AI will lighten the load, enabling staffers to only come into the office a handful of days a week. "I feel like if AI can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work for five days a week?" Yuan told The New York Times last year. "Every company will support three days, four days a week. I think this ultimately frees up everyone's time." While some workers are having luck being more productive with the AI tools, they could be burning themselves out. As employees tap into efficiency gains, they also take on more work in their daily routines, which could lead to burnout, according to a study from the University of California at Berkeley published this year. Burdened by a larger variety of tasks, they're using the time typically spent for taking natural breaks to complete more AI prompting. Employees need time to recharge -- otherwise they run the risk of actually becoming less productive. "AI brain fry" has also crept up as an issue in tech-forward workplaces. Employees are overwhelmed by intense oversight of AI tools, and it's worsening their mental fatigue, according to a 2026 study from Boston Consulting Group. And the data showed that the number of AI tools doesn't always necessarily link to increased productivity; those who used three or fewer AI tools self-reported improved efficiency, while it plummeted for those who used four or more. "People were using the tool and getting a lot more done, but also feeling like they were reaching the limits of their brain power, like there were too many decisions to make," Julie Bedard, study author and managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, told Fortune this year. "Things were moving too fast, and they didn't have the cognitive ability to process all the information and make all the decisions."

AI Is Forcing Employees to Work Harder Than Ever

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech More and more research shows that introducing AI in the workplace is actually forcing employees to work harder, instead of making their jobs easier. The latest comes from a new analysis from ActivTrak of over 164,000 workers' digital work activity. After examining their activity 180 days before and after the employees started using AI at work, the software company found that AI "intensified" their jobs in nearly every category, the Wall Street Journal reported. The time they spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled, while their use of business software surged by 94 percent. Strikingly, this came at the expense of the time workers spent on highly focused, uninterrupted work, which fell by 9 percent for AI users, and stayed the same for AI abstainers. The study suggests that there may be a "sweet spot" of AI usage, citing the finding that workers who spent 7 to 10 percent of their total work hours using AI showed the highest productivity, but only three percent of AI users fell in this range. "It's not that AI doesn't create efficiency," Gabriela Mauch, ActivTrak's chief customer officer and head of its productivity lab, told the WSJ. "It's that the capacity it frees up immediately gets repurposed into doing other work, and that's where the creep is likely to happen." The findings, which the WSJ reports is one of the biggest studies on AI's effects on work habits so far, come fresh off a study published by Harvard Business Review that also concluded AI was intensifying work instead of reducing workloads. In the ongoing study, which focused on employees at a tech firm where AI usage was voluntary, the researchers found that AI caused a "workload creep," in which the employees unknowingly took on more tasks than was sustainable for them to keep up. In this vicious cycle, AI raised expectations on the speed that workers had to perform, which in turn made them more reliant on AI to keep up with the greater demands. In short, the time that workers might be saving by using AI isn't being passed on to the workers. It only raises their own expectations, or their bosses' expectations, of how much work they should do -- which has them going straight back into AI tools; the ActivTrak data showed that the average time workers spent using them has risen eightfold from two years ago, per the WSJ, with AI adoption rising to 80 percent. "Workers often use the time savings to do more work rather than less because AI makes additional tasks feel easy and accessible, creating a sense of momentum," Aruna Ranganathan from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Businesses, who led the ongoing study on AI "workload creep," told the WSJ. Though it may boost productivity in the short-run, over time it "can lead to cognitive overload, burnout, poorer decision-making and declining work quality," she warned. Another recent study focused on the draining mental toll that AI causes among workers, coining the troubling phenomenon of "AI brain fry." It identified information overload and task switching that the tech encourages as some of the main culprits behind it, echoing the testimony of some programmers who've been emboldened by recent interest in the topic to criticize how AI is being used at their jobs. But the most mentally fatiguing aspect, the work found, was having to constantly supervise the AI tools, with some employees overseeing multiple AI agents performing different tasks at the same time.

Is AI productivity prompting burnout? Study finds new pattern of "AI brain fry"

Lana Zak is an anchor for CBS News 24/7 and a CBS News national correspondent. The promise of artificial intelligence has been simple: let the machines do the work. Instead, it may be creating a new headache from babysitting the machines. A new study published in Harvard Business Review suggests that instead of making work easier, AI may be giving some workers what researchers are calling "brain fry." Researchers surveyed about 1,500 workers and found that people constantly bouncing between multiple AI tools reported more decision fatigue and more errors. About one in seven workers said they had experienced mental fatigue from juggling AI tools at work. "The AI can run out far ahead of us, but we're still here with the same brain we had yesterday," said Julie Bedard, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group and an author of the study. She told CBS News the findings are an "early warning sign" that expectations around AI productivity may need recalibrating. "AI is really good in some ways for work. And in other ways, it gives us pause in how we do our work," Bedard said. "Specifically, there are ways in which intensive oversight of AI causes a lot of sort of cognitive, just exhaustion." The study found a striking paradox: AI can both reduce burnout and create it. When workers had to constantly supervise multiple AI systems or juggle several tools at once, mental strain increased sharply. By contrast, when workers used AI to actually offload repetitive tasks, their stress levels dropped. Bedard explained that AI "allows us to really extend our capabilities, basically extending our workload and our sphere of accountability at work," and that expansion of capability can quickly become overwhelming. "AI brain fry causes a lot of mental fatigue so we feel like it's beyond our brain's capability to handle those tasks," she said. For people working deeply with AI tools, the concept of "brain fry" resonates. "There's a point that usually happens after a full day where I just kind of feel exhausted in a way that I didn't feel in a normal work day before AI," said Jack Downey, Head of Strategy, Operations and Product at Webster Pass Consulting. He uses AI daily to build automation systems and finds there is an additional mental strain that comes from AI workflows. "You're constantly waiting... and you're changing gears," he said. "It works so quickly, but not quite quickly enough that it happens instantaneously. And so it might take five seconds to do one task, 50 seconds to do another task, and five minutes to do another task." Downey said he usually has several different windows open to work on multiple parts of a project at the same time. While the technology expands what workers can do, it also expands what they're expected to do, even if that expectation is internally driven. "The capacity of AI is so endless that it can be really hard to just say no and stop whatever the next improvement is that you want," Downey said. "As a perfectionist, that often can result in not knowing when to stop. The next best thing is possible, so, often, you end up spending more time writing the perfect workflow and telling AI what to do." Downey said he finds that setting deadlines for himself and his AI helps to limit the fry and produce a better product. For years, many predictions about artificial intelligence suggested the technology would allow fewer workers to do more work faster. But if AI is already pushing workers toward cognitive overload, organizations may need to rethink those assumptions, Bedard said. "We need to redesign how we do our work... where we don't just keep exactly what we did yesterday and put AI on the top of it," she said. The study found that leadership and training could play a critical role. Less brain fry was seen among employees whose managers were intentional with their AI use. If businesses don't figure that out, their bottom lines may suffer. Workers experiencing AI brain fry reported more mistakes, slower decision-making, and higher fatigue. Bedard is clear that the solution is not abandoning AI, but rethinking how human workers best interact with these tools as the AI revolution accelerates. The promise of AI may be limitless. The question is how far the human brain can stretch to keep up.

'AI brain fry' is real -- and it's making workers more exhausted, not more productive, new study finds | Fortune

If you're one of the early AI adopters, maybe your brain is totally fried. Take Francesco Bonacci, a software engineer and founder of Cua AI, who warned of "vibe coding paralysis" last month. In an X post, he described AI's ability to complete incredible taskloads, leaving workers time to generate new ideas they can then give to bots to flesh out. But the result was not an empowered, productive employee. Rather, it was a mountain of half-finished projects and a human too overwhelmed to complete or make sense of any of it. "The paradox: the more capability you have, the more you feel compelled to use it. The more you use it, the more fragmented your attention becomes. The more fragmented your attention, the less you actually ship," Bonacci wrote. Steve Yegge, a longtime blogger about computer programming, called this the "AI vampire" in a Medium essay, arguing that it was a "concerning new phenomenon." He likened AI's tendency to encourage human overwork to Colin Robinson, an "energy vampire" from the FX TV series What We Do In The Shadows, who thrived off the enervation of human beings. Boston Consulting Group has another phrase for this. Future-of-work experts call it "AI brain fry" and warn the excessive oversight of AI tools could overwhelm employees at the expense of workplace productivity. A study conducted by Boston Consulting Group found in a survey of 1,488 full-time U.S.-based workers, the number of AI tools used did not always correlate with increased productivity. While respondents reported increased productivity when using three or fewer AI tools, when they said they used four or more, self-reported productivity plummeted. The researchers indicated AI brain fry could lose companies valuable talent and cost them millions of dollars. They cited a 2018 report from Gartner, which found suboptimal decision-making at a $5 billion revenue firm cost it $150 million per year. Moreover, the study found that among workers who reported AI brain fry, 34% showed active intention to leave the company (ie, quit). That's compared to 25% among those who did not report AI brain fry. The surveyed workers said that when their AI-related work required higher levels of oversight -- reading through and interpreting text a large language model generated versus an AI agent completing administrative tasks, for example -- they expended 14% more mental effort at work. High AI oversight was also associated with 12% greater mental fatigue and 19% greater information overload. Many respondents reported a "fog" or "buzzing" associated with overuse of AI that required them to physically step away from their computers. Others said the number of small mistakes they made increased as a result of feeling this brain fry. "People were using the tool and getting a lot more done, but also feeling like they were reaching the limits of their brain power, like there were too many decisions to make," Julie Bedard, study author and managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, told Fortune. "Things were moving too fast, and they didn't have the cognitive ability to process all the information and make all the decisions." Sweeping claims about AI's productivity-increasing capabilities combined with inconclusive data has sparked widespread debate on the efficacy of using the technology in the workplace. Erik Meijer, a former senior engineering leader at Meta, recently marvelled that Anthropic's Claude Code has "pushed the state of the art in software engineering further than 75 years of academic research" in just a matter of months. A February 2025 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated a 1.1% increase in aggregate productivity as a result of using generative in the AI workplace -- a boost that translated to workers becoming 33% more productive each hour they use the tool. An analysis from Goldman Sachs this month, however, found no "meaningful relationship between productivity and AI adoption at the economy-wide level," but rather was effective in just two specific use cases: customer service and software development tasks. That report follows a survey of 6,000 of C-suite executives, 90% of whom found no evidence of AI impacting productivity or employment in their workplaces in the past three years. Those executives forecast AI would increase productivity by 1.4% in the next three years. Reported increases in workplace productivity as a result of AI also seem to come with a cost. An eight-month study of a 200-person U.S. tech firm led by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that AI tools were able to increase an employee's workload, which subsequently led to more burnout and overall acted as a drag on workplace efficiency in the long run. The researchers concluded that AI actually intensifying work, as opposed to freeing up more time and mental space. Employees are processing more information and have less of a boundary between work and non-work. AI really is something like a vampire or a fryer, in other words -- it won't do the work for you, but force you to use your brain a lot more than you're used to. "Those are all real costs," Bedard said. "Companies [say], 'We want fewer errors, we want better decisions, and we want our best people to stay.'" Bedard noted the answer to resolving AI brain fry is not to eliminate AI at work, but to think critically about how it is being implemented. Too many companies are introducing the technology in the workplace by dumping it on top of an employee's already-established set of responsibilities. Instead, workplace leaders should instead redesign roles and give employees training on planning and prioritization skills, she said. The study found when managers provided training and support on using AI tools, brain fry decreased. The Berkeley researchers suggested the antidote to AI brain fry is to batch activities requiring AI tools to a specific block of the work day. They said employees should build in times to take a step back from their work, in particular ahead of a challenging decision or demanding task. In other words, AI is such a powerful tool, you need to step back from it to catch your breath. Vampires can fly, after all, but you need to clip their wings at times. "One really hopeful message for leaders and managers is, You have a really important role to play here in rethinking what work looks like in a world of AI," Bedard said.

AI Use at Work Is Causing "Brain Fry," Researchers Find, Especially Among High Performers

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech It's looking more and more like using AI to churn out work can take a considerable toll on your mental health, despite the tech's promises of easing workloads. The latest research to illustrate this grim trend: a survey of nearly 1,500 full time US workers, which found that an alarming proportion of employees who constantly use AI at work to push their productivity past their normal capacity are becoming fatigued, as the researchers from from Boston Consulting Group and University of California, Riverside described in a new report in Harvard Business Review. The researchers even gave the phenomenon an evocative name: "AI brain fry." "One of the reasons we did this work is because we saw this happening to people who were perceived as really high performers," Julie Bedard, a partner at BCG and an author of the report, told Axios. In the study, 14 percent of workers said they had experienced "mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity." The percentage was highest in marketing, software development, HR, finance, and IT roles. Many employees described brain fry symptoms using similar language. They reported a "buzzing" feeling or a mental "fog." Other symptoms included headaches and slower decision-making. AI companies promise that AI can supercharge productivity. Whether or not that's true, the tech is enabling workers to multitask at a speed and workload well past their regular limit, which seems to be part of the problem regarding its cognitive effects. The study identified information overload and constant task switching as some of the main drivers of brain fry. In particular, the most draining aspect of using AI to automate work was oversight, or the need to constantly supervise the AI tools, with some overseeing multiple AI agents at the same time. A high degree of oversight predicted 12 percent more mental fatigue for employees, the report found. "I had one tool helping me weigh technical decisions, another spitting out drafts and summaries, and I kept bouncing between them, double-checking every little thing," one senior engineering manager described in the HBR report. "But instead of moving faster, my brain just started to feel cluttered. Not physically tired, just... crowded. It was like I had a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention." "My thinking wasn't broken, just noisy -- like mental static," the senior manager continued. "What finally snapped me out of it was realizing I was working harder to manage the tools than to actually solve the problem." The work also found a correlation between self-reported AI brain fry and an employee's intent to quit their company. Intent to leave rose by nearly 10 percent among those who reported AI brain fry. Brain fry is also bad news for an employer's all-important bottom line. Workers who experienced brain fry experienced a 33 percent increase in decision fatigue. For multibillion dollar firms, this could translate to millions of dollars of being lost to poor decision-making or paralysis each year. The findings add to a growing body of research and anecdotal accounts describing the toll of using AI at the workplace. Another report in HBR last month found that AI was actually intensifying work instead of reducing workloads. Amid increasing discussion into the topic, more engineers have come out to criticize AI's usage in the workplace, with many admitting that their own AI usage was speeding them towards burnout.

AI Use in Workplaces Causing 'Brain Fry,' Say Researchers

The excessive use and oversight of artificial intelligence in the workplace is giving workers "AI brain fry," contrary to the technology's assurance that it would ease job pressures. Workers who are using AI tools report that the technology is "intensifying rather than simplifying work," researchers from Boston Consulting Group and the University of California wrote in the Harvard Business Review on Friday. A study of nearly 1,500 full-time US workers found 14% said they had experienced "mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity," or what the researchers called "AI brain fry." Respondents described having a "mental hangover" with a "fog" or "buzzing" and an inability to think clearly, along with headaches, slower decision-making, and difficulty focusing. AI companies have pushed their products as a productivity booster, allowing workers to offload some or part of their workloads, a message that some companies have taken on and started to measure AI use as a performance metric. Crypto exchange Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said he fired engineers who didn't want to use AI, and set a goal late last year to have AI generate half of the platform's code. "As enterprises use more multi-agent systems, employees find themselves toggling between more tools," the researchers wrote. "Contrary to the promise of having more time to focus on meaningful work, juggling and multitasking can become the definitive features of working with AI." The researchers said this AI-induced mental strain "carries significant costs in the form of increased employee errors, decision fatigue, and intention to quit." Study respondents who said they had brain fry experienced 33% more decision fatigue compared to those who didn't, which researchers said could cost large companies millions of dollars a year. Those with AI brain fry were also around 40% more likely to have an active intent to quit. Those reporting AI brain fry also self-reported making nearly 40% more major errors than those who did not, with a major error defined as one with "serious consequences, such as those that could affect safety, outcomes, or important decisions." The researchers found, however, that the use of AI to replace repetitive and routine tasks decreased burnout, a state of chronic workplace stress that leads to negative feelings about the job and decreased effectiveness. Related: Anthropic reopens Pentagon talks as tech groups push Trump to drop risk tag Respondents who used AI to reduce time spent on routine and repetitive tasks reported their levels of burnout were 15% lower than those who didn't use AI in such a way. The researchers said company leaders looking to reduce AI brain fry should "clearly define AI's purpose in the organization" and explain how workloads will change with the tool. Companies should also stick to "measurable outcomes" for AI, as "incentivizing quantity of use will lead to waste, low-quality work, and unnecessary mental strain."

AI Is Boosting Productivity -- but Data Shows Employee Workloads Are Getting Heavier

That's the top finding of the 2026 State of the Workplace report by employee analytics and intelligence company ActivTrak. Its analysis of over 443 million hours of work activity across 1,111 organizations revealed that adoption rates of AI tools in businesses surged from 53 percent two years ago to 80 percent in 2025. That helped increase the number of productive employee hours last year by 5 percent, even as the average workday length decreased by 2 percent. At the same time, as apps automated certain job tasks, they created new kinds of work that compounded, intensified, and sped up the pace of staff workloads. In other words, while the task automating tech is fulfilling some of the efficiency and productivity promises its developers predicted, its also causing -- and at times forcing -- employees who use it to take on more work elsewhere. "Despite expectations that AI would reduce workloads, the findings show otherwise: AI is amplifying work activity across nearly every category measured," said ActivTrak's summary of the study's findings. "After AI adoption, time spent across work applications increased between 27 percent and 346 percent, including a 104 percent increase in email, a 145 percent increase in chat and messaging and a 94 percent rise in business management tools. Meanwhile, AI users' average daily focused time declined 23 minutes." That runs counter to expectations of AI taking over repetitive, uninspiring, and often lower-value tasks from employees who could use the time saved to work on more creative, strategic, and productive work. Instead, apps are often just packing additional new duties into users' workdays.

The Rise of AI 'Brain Fry'

Microsoft, like most large software companies, has been pushing its customers to use -- and pay for -- AI features over the last few years, filling familiar apps and interfaces with new chatbots and buttons in an effort to figure out which habits might stick. In 2026, with so much excitement about AI-powered programming and more ambitious "agentic" tools, the company is shifting in a new direction, releasing its own take on Anthropic's "Cowork" tool to its massive user base: For a firm with such close and early ties to frontier models, Microsoft has struggled to translate early-adopter AI use into tools that regular office workers actually want, leaving customers feeling spammed and harassed by all the new tools it keeps throwing at them. Cowork is a departure. It's Microsoft's take on the industry-wide reorientation toward funneling AI capabilities into a single chat window -- the general productivity equivalent of vibe coding. This format has started to prove out for software development, but hasn't yet penetrated the broader world of spreadsheets and slide decks. At the level of software, tools like this represent a fascinating change in interface, a jump from apps designed for people to use -- think the classic Office suite -- to a set of services to be manipulated through language. In the late '80s, a software productivity suite might have felt like a similar new set of abstractions: Elements of a word processor and a secretarial staff merged and semi-automated into Word; formerly human accounting functions incorporated into a piece of spreadsheet software that could also render a chart. Tools like Cowork, in their early forms, move things up another layer, using AI to manipulate software in the approximate manner of an employee, and through a personified chat interface. The result, if such a system works, is more productivity, a single person able to interact with more tools and services at the same time, shifting the attention they used to pay to a single Excel window to a chat interface that can manage an Excel task, a Word task, and a PowerPoint task at the same time. But it also changes how the work feels, in a way that early adopters and researchers are quickly coming to understand: This simulation of delegation -- assigning tasks, checking in on tasks, checking the results of tasks, and coordinating those tasks toward an individual or organizational goal -- feels an awful lot like management. Microsoft's Cowork was built with help from Anthropic, which has its own tool called Cowork, and is a pretty good preview of where tech firms think productivity apps might be going. If your work currently involves a bunch of enterprise software suites, populated with different apps and tied together by dashboards, there's a good chance you'll soon be confronted with an interface that asks, hey, what if we just managed all this with chat? At first, tools like this feel empowering. You're doing more with less! You're outsourcing to a machine! You're sending a command and expecting, at some point in the near future, to be handed back something resembling a work product. After a brief ecstatic period, though -- and particularly with sustained use -- additional feelings start to emerge alongside this new prolificacy. Programmers, suddenly improvising as software project managers, find themselves spread thing and out of their depth. New research by the Boston Consulting Group and the University of California, Riverside tries to capture this experience, which programmers have been joking about for months. And indeed, its survey of workers using agentic software suggests that keeping track of a bunch of tools via AI, working in the background on increasingly long timelines, and in some cases doing tasks beyond your area of focus or expertise, can leave workers feeling out of sorts. They came up with a term to describe the effect, which was felt by a small but meaningful segment of respondents: "AI brain fry." Brain fry, they argue, is the result of constant shifts in attention between tasks, increased oversight, suddenly interrupted work styles, and bursts in perceived productivity leading to a belief that they should be even more productive. As a friend who works at an AI startup where this style of work is the norm told me: "Ultimately all work boils down to a single question: Did I do this well or did I fuck it up? And what AI assistants do is massively inflate the size of the "this" in question, with a massive increase in the surface area of things one is responsible for having possibly fucked up." While researchers found that using AI to routinize or eliminate repetitive tasks and drudgery could result in reduced feelings of burnout, the separate sense of brain fry -- manifesting among some respondents as actual headaches -- was associated with high performers and was somewhat predictive of a desire to quit, to which the aforementioned friend responded: "relatable." In the looming shadow of workplace automation, this is a mixed bag. It's upskilling and intensification, undertaken with little to no guidance from above, under conditions of pervasive anxiety and fear. As with anything to do with AI, there's a lot of novelty here, and parts of the experience of "mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity" are surely unique to the moment. But they're also consonant with more familiar experiences. Managing a fleet of AI agents -- or shifting the way you think about your Microsoft productivity software from "a group of apps" to "a bunch of weird little guys in the computer" or even just "an assistant who I tell to use my computer for me -- is some extent a simulation of the benefits and stresses of being a manager, with the crucial difference that your "employees" have no real responsibility or liability, and their outputs and mistakes accrue to you. (You can get a tiny taste of this in Nadella's otherwise dry promo video above, in which a user creates a huge quantity of documents, including a presentation, in a matter of seconds, presumably to be used and distributed into an actual work contexts where they matter, and where errors or deficiencies would reflect poorly on him.) Anyone who with exposure to modern tech and tech-adjacent workplaces will also recognize something else here: A cadence of working that is constant, real-time, and built around the logic of chat. At Every, Katie Parriott synthesizes some of the early work on AI work intensification, including a study looking at a small tech company much like my friend's, conducted over eight months by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes: Workers prompted AI during lunch, in meetings, while waiting for files to load. Some sent a "quick last prompt" before leaving their desk so the AI could work while they stepped away. Prompting felt closer to chatting than to formal labor, so the workday lost its natural pauses. This is different from the boundaries that were blurred by tools such as laptops and smartphones. The old boundary crossing was driven by obligation. You may have resented receiving a Slack notification after official working hours, but you couldn't ignore it. By contrast, this boundary crossing doesn't feel like that at all. Prompting feels closer to chatting than to work, so the job spills into evenings before you know it. Ideally, having a bunch of new software tools that make your work easier is just nice, assuming it also doesn't mean you're about to get laid off. In practice, though, it can also combine the stresses of management with the further dissolution of work boundaries that keep us sane, with unclear benefits. (More than a decade into the mainstream work-chat revolution, its effect on worker productivity are hard to detect, whiles its tendency to break down work-life norms is widely experienced, intuitive, and well-documented.) Tech workers already feel this. If tools like Cowork start to diffuse through the economy, pretty much anyone who works on a computer could, too.

Do You Have 'Brain Fry'? A New Study Says This Everyday Technology Is Causing It

Survey respondents described a buzzing or foggy feeling, headaches and slower decision‑making. Using AI too much can lead to a new problem called "AI brain fry," according to a new Harvard Business Review study. The issue arises when AI users push their minds to exhaustion. The study defined brain fry as "mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity." It shows up when workers are constantly prompting models, reviewing outputs, switching between tools and monitoring AI systems at a pace their brains can't comfortably sustain. In Harvard Business Review's survey of 1,488 full‑time U.S. workers, 14% of those using AI said they had experienced this kind of mental fatigue. Respondents described a buzzing or foggy feeling, headaches, slower decision‑making and a sense that they couldn't tell whether their AI‑assisted work "made any sense" anymore. These effects were especially common in roles like marketing, software development, human resources and finance, where people juggle multiple AI tools and information streams at once. Brain fry is different from classic burnout, which stems from a chronically heavy workload, lack of control and emotional exhaustion over time. Instead, brain fry is about acute cognitive overload, like having too many browser tabs open in your head. The study linked AI brain fry to concrete performance and retention risks, including higher error rates, greater information overload and a higher intention to quit. AI is increasingly becoming more popular. Over half of Americans (56%) use it, according to a 2025 YouGov survey. The Harvard Business Review study indicated that using AI to offload repetitive, low-value tasks instead of multiplying oversight duties can actually reduce burnout. Workers who only used AI to automate routine work saw lower burnout scores because their mental energy shifted to more meaningful tasks. At an individual level, the research showed that people can prevent brain fry by limiting the number of AI tools they use at once, avoiding constant task-switching, and scheduling regular breaks. At a team or organizational level, the research suggested that managers should be intentional about when and how they require AI. The study emphasized integrating AI where it reliably cuts back busy work, like document summaries, basic coding and first drafts. "The AI can run out far ahead of us, but we're still here with the same brain we had yesterday," Julie Bedard, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group and an author of the study, told CBS News. "We need to redesign how we do our work... where we don't just keep exactly what we did yesterday and put AI on top of it."

People who use AI most are more mentally drained, finds study

I remember seeing a Reddit post a while back of a programmer's AI agent setup. Just looking at those six terminal windows, four coding agents running in parallel, output scrolling faster than any human could read made me feel overwhelmed. The comments were full of people calling it the future and also some that said it gave them a panic attack just watching. I understood both reactions completely. Also read: ChatGPT timeline: Is OpenAI's pursuit for speed costing them substance? A new study by Boston Consulting Group, published in Harvard Business Review, has a name for what that feeling is: "AI brain fry." I've been covering and dealing with AI long enough to recognise the phenomenon before I had the vocabulary for it - that particular mental static that sets in after a day of intensive AI work, where rereading the same sentence four times starts to feel normal and decisions that should take seconds just somehow don't. BCG surveyed 1,488 full-time US workers and found 14% of those using AI at work have experienced it. I would argue the real number is higher, because most people assume it's just tiredness or don't want to admit to using AI at work. What I find most striking about the findings is who's getting hit hardest. It's not reluctant adopters or the AI-skeptics. It's the power users, the people companies are most aggressively pushing to do more. Meta counts AI-generated lines of code as an engineering performance metric. Firms are measuring token consumption as a proxy for output. The implicit message is that more tools, more agents, more simultaneous AI activity equals more value. The study's data punctures that logic cleanly, productivity gains climb from one AI tool to two, then again to three, and then after three tools running at once, the numbers start to fall. Also read: Tata Power-Salesforce want to install solar power units on 25 crore Indian rooftops The distinction the study draws between brain fry and burnout is one that I think often gets lost in most workplace AI conversations. When I use AI to clear repetitive work off my plate, burnout scores drop by 15% according to BCG's data. The problem isn't AI, it's AI oversight. Monitoring agents, catching errors, toggling between outputs. All of that taxes attention, working memory, and executive control in ways that exhaustion surveys simply don't capture. Workers experiencing brain fry in the study made major errors at a 39% higher rate and reported 33% more decision fatigue than those who didn't. I keep coming back to one line from a senior engineering manager quoted in the piece, "I was working harder to manage the tools than to actually solve the problem." That's not a story of losing productivity, that's more of a design failure.