Study Finds That AI Is Adding to Employees' Workload and Burning Them Out

But executives still think it's going to be a magic bullet.

Work Roll

Despite executives' expectations to the contrary, a new study from one of the world's largest gig work platforms has found that artificial intelligence is piling new workloads and stress on existing employees.

In a new study about AI and employee workloads, the gig marketplace Upwork found that 77 percent of workers who use AI say the technology is doing more work for them, and that it's contributing to burnout and making it harder to be productive.

Upwork also found that a whopping 96 percent of C-suiters expected AI to be a magic bullet for their employees' productivity — a trend we've seen as CEOs rush to deploy these technologies at their companies and sometimes even lay off human staff in the process.

Despite executive bullishness on the prospect of AI unlocking worker productivity, only a quarter of the C-suiters surveyed said their companies had AI training programs set up, and only 13 percent had adequate strategies in place to make those sorts of prospective gains happen.

Comparatively, 47 percent of employees who use AI said they don't even know how the tools are supposed to help their productivity. Juxtaposed against each other, those dueling figures tell you everything you need to know about the disparities between execs and their underlings when it comes to AI.

Burn, Baby, Burn

To get to these jarring figures, Upwork interviewed 2,500 people — 1,250 executives, 625 full-time and salaried employees, and 625 freelancers — in the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada.

Beyond just discussing AI in particular, the survey also had some startling findings when it came to burnout and employer expectations.

As Upwork explains, 71 percent of full-time employees surveyed said they're burnt out and 65 percent said they're struggling to meet their employers' demands. The honchos making those demands, meanwhile, seem to be aware of what they're doing: 81 percent of them acknowledged to Upwork that they've increased employee demands over the past year.

One in three workers surveyed, meanwhile, said they're likely to quit their jobs within the next six months because they're burned out or overworked.

Being a pro-business platform, Upwork maintains that AI can increase productivity when implemented well — but it's still a pretty big deal that a gig work company is calling out the technology that so many CEOs have banked on to revolutionize their businesses over the past few years.

More on AI in the workplace: Company Abandons Plans to Give AI Workers "Rights" and Add Them to Org Chart After Outcry From Human Employees