AI Made Your Team Faster. So Why Does Everyone Feel Worse?">
The pause
I wrote about a pattern I keep running into on LinkedIn and then I was inspired to write this article.
When I ask people how they use AI at work, most say it's useful. Then we talk for a few minutes and there's a pause.
They're getting more done. Or they feel like they are. But when they step back and look at what all that speed delivered, they're not sure. Same hours. More output. More frantic.
I ended that post with a question for owners: if you've rolled AI out to your team, are people getting time back, or just doing more?
This piece is for the people running those teams. If you rolled out AI and your people look more productive but feel more scattered, I don't think they're using it wrong. I think nobody designed how the work should change.
What's actually happening
From the conversations I've had, three things keep coming up.
Review replaced flow. The job used to be making the thing. Now it's checking the thing. People iterate faster, but they spend the day reviewing outputs instead of getting deep into the work. That constant check-in breaks the focus that good work needs.
The wait invites switching. While the machine works, you go do something else. Then you come back and review. Then you prompt again and go do something else. Add video calls where it's easy to have AI running in the background, and the whole day turns into switching. That's where the fog comes from.
Polished isn't the same as understood. AI hands you something that looks finished, fast. It's thoroughly written, nicely formatted, sometimes better than what you'd have made. But people tell me they don't always fully grasp the work they're putting out. And when you don't fully grasp it, decisions get harder.
Under all three is the dopamine. You type a few words and get back something polished almost instantly. It's the same loop as social media or short-form video, except it feels like work. That makes it harder to notice.
It's a design problem, not a willpower problem
Most AI rollouts I hear about look the same. Everyone gets a login. Maybe a training session. Then the expectation that people will be more productive.
What nobody does is redesign the work. The tool changed. The way work flows through the day didn't.
I design operational systems for businesses. In the post I said that when something this useful makes people's work feel worse, I want to know why. Here's where I've landed. You don't blame the people. You look at the system around them. And the system right now is built for instant results: type, get, review, repeat. That's great for speed. It's not built for focus, judgment, or knowing what you actually made.
Telling your team to "use it more mindfully" won't fix that. Changing how the work is set up will.
What a better rollout looks like
None of this is complicated. It just takes deciding how you want the work to go before you hand people the tool.
- Start with the outcome, not the tool. Pick the work that matters most and decide what "better" means for it. Faster? Fewer errors? Time back for customers? Then decide where AI fits.
- Think before you prompt. Know what you want before you ask for it. People who decide first stay in charge of the work and understand what comes back.
- Batch the review. Don't check every output the moment it lands. Set times to review. That gives people stretches of real focus in between.
- Protect some focus time. Some work should stay AI-free. Some meetings too. If you're on a call, be on the call.
- Measure outcomes, not output. More drafts and more documents isn't the goal. Ask whether people are getting time back, making better decisions, and doing better work.
- Talk about it. Ask your team how it actually feels. The conversations I've had are where all of this came from. Your team will tell you more than any dashboard.
We're early
Cars didn't always have seatbelts. They were useful long before they were safe, and it took years to figure out how to live with them well.
AI feels like that to me. It's genuinely useful and could be hugely beneficial. We're just early in learning how to use it, and adoption is always slower than we expect.
The businesses that get this right won't be the ones using AI the most. They'll be the ones that thought about how their people should work with it.
If you're working through this with your team, I'd like to hear what you're seeing. What's working, and what's just making everyone busier?