AI was meant to lighten the load.
For many, it’s doing the opposite – particularly for women in tech, who are often already facing high expectations, visibility pressures and underrepresentation at work.
A 2024 Upwork study found 77% of employees say AI has increased their workload, while BCG/HBR research shows 14% are experiencing ‘AI brain fry’ – with more fatigue, errors and intent to quit. Evidence suggests AI isn’t reducing working hours, but expanding tasks and blurring boundaries of the working day.
Without human guardrails, AI isn’t a productivity tool — it’s a burnout accelerator. Here are five principles leaders can act on now to protect their teams.
Who is in control – your people or AI?
Ask your team a simple question: does working with AI make you feel more or less competent? Do they feel in charge or are they being driven by AI?
When AI handles the drafting, debugging, or first analysis, humans are left to review and approve – and the body’s effort–reward loop quietly breaks. Over time, this registers not as a thought but as a feeling: a vague flatness, a loss of appetite for the work. If teams feel pressured to operate at an AI pace, rather than being supported by it, there is a real risk to meaning and purpose at work.
Without addressing this early, organisations may only see the consequences once skills have declined and employees are left compensating for gaps. This matters even more for individuals where credibility and confidence are already under scrutiny.
Encourage connection and reflection at team level
AI is quietly displacing human-to-human interaction and consequentially, a sense of belonging.
AI enables individuals to complete tasks they once needed colleagues for, filling informal break time with prompting sessions, and mediating communication through summaries and drafts. A 2026 Resume Now survey found 63% of workers expect AI to make the workplace feel less human.
The antidote is deliberate: build ‘human-first’ rituals, with check-ins and shared reflection. Replace at least one AI-generated message each day with a real conversation. Protect time for spontaneous exchanges – asking a colleague builds trust, asking AI doesn’t.
Protect skills and the sense of development
The deskilling risk is not hypothetical. Endoscopists using AI saw their detection rates drop from 28.4% to 22.4% when it was removed. Junior developers report losing the ability to debug without it. And 21% of companies have stopped hiring entry-level roles altogether, cutting off the pipeline where expertise is built.
Leaders must define ‘non-negotiable’ skills for each role and create space to practice them – even when AI could do the task faster. A sense of progress and mastery is key to engagement and wellbeing. Take that away, and you risk hollowing out your workforce.
This has real implications for career progression – particularly for women in tech, where access to hands-on learning and skill-building is crucial for long-term development.
Use AI gains to create space, not pressure
If automation just leads to more work, it can feel punitive and can kill innovation. The BCG/HBR research confirms that backfilling automated work immediately is one of the clearest leadership errors in AI adoption.
Instead, share the gains. Use some of the time AI frees up for genuine recovery: encourage breaks, hold clear work boundaries, express appreciation. When AI replaces repetitive tasks well, burnout scores drop 15% and workers report higher engagement and social connection. The goal is work that feels less dense, not more – a sign that the organisation values its people as more than production units.
Protecting focus in an AI-driven world
Using a small number of AI tools can boost productivity, but adding more has the opposite effect – it becomes unproductive multitasking. Yet workers are running multiple AI threads in parallel, feeling momentum even as their cognitive capacity erodes.
Leaders need to set clear guardrails: batch AI-heavy work, whilst protecting focus time and building in recovery windows for individuals.
Just because AI never rests, it doesn’t mean your people shouldn’t.
The bottom line: AI is here to stay. The organisations that thrive will be the ones that treat human experience – competence, connection and recovery – as essential, not expendable.
