workday grows with AI

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June Zaccone

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Mar 29, 2025, 9:17:16 AMMar 29

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As AI’s power grows, so does our workday Wei Jiang Junyoung Park Rachel Xiao Shen Zhang/ 28 Mar 2025

Technological progress is typically expected to lighten the burden of work. But as artificial intelligence has been integrated into workplaces, early evidence suggests a paradox: instead of reducing workloads, many AI-equipped employees are busier than ever. This column examines the relationship between AI exposure, the length of the workday, time allocation, and worker satisfaction. Though AI-driven automation and delegation allow workers to complete the same tasks more efficiently, the authors find that employees in AI-exposed occupations are working longer hours and spending less time on socialisation and leisure.

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Two key mechanisms help explain this result. First, AI raises worker productivity, creating incentives for longer hours. When AI complements human labour rather than replacing it, the process makes each hour of work more valuable. This effect is strongest in jobs where AI helps employees perform tasks more efficiently, such as finance, research, and technical fields. Employers may expect more output; workers, incentivised by productivity-linked pay, may extend their hours. AI-exposed occupations have indeed seen wage increases, suggesting that firms are sharing some productivity gains. However, higher wages have not translated into more leisure time. Instead, workers appear to be substituting additional earnings for longer hours, a pattern consistent with the economic principle that when work becomes more rewarding, people may choose to do more of it.

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The second mechanism is AI-driven performance monitoring. Digital surveillance tools have expanded, particularly in remote and hybrid work environments. AI enables real-time tracking of employee effort, leading to longer working hours. Our study examines the COVID-19 period as a natural experiment, when AI-driven monitoring surged due to remote work. Jobs that were more ‘remote-feasible’ at the onset of COVID-19 experienced dramatic improvement in remote work monitoring during the next two years. Occupations with high exposure to AI surveillance technologies – such as customer service representatives, stockers and order fillers, dispatchers, and truck drivers – experienced longer work hours post COVID even after workers returned to the office. This effect was absent among the self-employed, confirming that it is not simply the nature of AI-exposed jobs but the principal-agent dynamics of employment that drive longer work hours. Monitoring increases employer oversight and tightens performance expectations, often at the cost of work-life balance. Some AI-intensive roles saw the introduction of automated performance scores, leading employees to work harder to avoid falling behind peers in algorithm-driven assessments.

jz: AI use has other problems. For example, a doctor reports on AI write-up of patient visit notes:

"From his e-mail: The visits are now being recorded and about 10 minutes later – the AI generated visit notes appear in the chart. On almost 2/3 of the charts that are being processed, there are major errors, making stuff up, incorrect statements, etc. Unfortunately – as you can see it is wickedly able to render all this in correct “doctorese” – the code and syntax we all use and can instantly tell it was written by a truly trained MD.

I have noted to my dismay that most of my colleagues do not even look at these – they simply sign off on them."