White-collar workers report growing feelings of ‘AI brain fry’

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":6.5,"text":"Hello and welcome to Working It."}],[{"start":9.25,"text":"I’m Bethan, the FT’s deputy work and careers editor, standing in for Isabel this week while she’s on sabbatical."}],[{"start":16.25,"text":"Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit about the early years of my career, and in particular a feeling I experienced a lot: being frazzled. "}],[{"start":24.7,"text":"Doing restaurant shifts as a teenager I’d dash about feeling competent, then realise I’d missed entire tables. I can still recall the horror I felt when a diner asked about his hour-late main course and I found his order in my pocket, never sent to the kitchen. "}],[{"start":39.15,"text":"Later, in journalism, I’d worry about gathering piles of sourcing, never feeling it was quite enough for a perfect feature. Research meant opening an unreadable quantity of tabs. There were always more opportunities, tasks, ideas — the problem was getting on top of them all. "}],[{"start":56.75,"text":"Luckily, I’m better at managing my workload these days. To-do lists and deadlines help, but it’s mainly down to better judgment and focus — something many of us need to develop over years of experience at work. "}],[{"start":68.15,"text":"So I find it worrying that this hard-won ability to pick a task and get it done is facing a new and formidable foe. No prizes for guessing what it might be. "}],[{"start":78.5,"text":"AI’s productivity promise is giving way to cognitive overload and ‘buzzing’ "}],[{"start":83.1,"text":"AI’s big sell is that we get to do more: outsource tasks, vibe code ideas, and produce research to make a case for any plan in a matter of minutes."}],[{"start":93.05,"text":"But I’m hearing more and more that, for many workers and businesses, this infinite possibility is giving way to a reality of overwhelm, with meaningful work drowned by perpetually reproducing AI outputs."}],[{"start":105.6,"text":"Researchers from Boston Consulting Group have coined a term for this: AI Brain Fry, or “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity”. Interviews with 1,488 workers uncovered a small epidemic of this mental strain, distinct from burnout and characterised by a “buzzing” feeling, difficulty focusing and slower decision-making — plus errors, decision fatigue and even intention to quit."}],[{"start":134.7,"text":"Julie Bedard, research co-author, says it germinated as she explored why AI’s potential to improve productivity was not always fulfilled. “It felt like the gap was getting even bigger between what the tech could do and where . . . people were,” she told me. “There’s a whole bunch of organisational boundaries and issues and workflows, but I also felt like it was just our brains [that] don’t know how to suddenly do 10 extra things.”"}],[{"start":160.89999999999998,"text":"The workers Bedard spoke to reported “cognitive overload” as they juggled more tasks. This felt like a familiar aspect of dealing, say, with too many emails, as well as using agents. But there is a distinct AI element too: if you outsource repetitive tasks while keeping things such as judgment or creativity to yourself, you are “keeping the most cognitively challenging part of your job with the human”, says Bedard. "}],[{"start":185.7,"text":"Bedard and her colleagues aren’t the only people to notice this phenomenon. Another helpful explanation of this feeling came from AI founder and developer Francesco Bonacci, who has coined the term “vibe coding paralysis” to describe his experience of using Claude Code to start a whole bunch of new projects but struggling to actually get anything done."}],[{"start":207.1,"text":"In a viral blog, he describes ending each day exhausted. “Six worktrees open, four half-written features, two ‘quick fixes’ that spawned rabbit holes, and a growing sense that I’m losing the plot entirely,” he writes. “The more fragmented your attention, the less you actually ship. It’s . . . cognitive overload masked as productivity.”"}],[{"start":228.29999999999998,"text":"Software engineering is a brain-fry hotspot. According to BCG, others include marketing, where 26 per cent of workers said it was an issue. "}],[{"start":237.7,"text":"Bedard suggests why this might be the case: marketing jobs “are creative without a clear definition of done”. AI encourages us to iterate, producing or fine-tuning more ideas. It also makes it easier to analyse data or to personalise campaigns that “intensifies the workload”.  "}],[{"start":254.1,"text":"She also found people are more likely to experience the mental fatigue and information overload of brain fry when their AI use requires more oversight, or direct monitoring by humans."}],[{"start":265.2,"text":"To understand why this is so exhausting, Bedard uses the example of creating a brief for a marketing campaign. “In the past somebody would actually do that themselves. They would pull the data. They would know the sources. They would trust the output because they trust the process,” she says. Using AI, they can now create a “tremendous amount” of detail and multiple briefs, but all that has to be made sense of, checked, and fine-tuned into a final product. That can be more overwhelming than processing a shorter brief that an employee has understood from start to finish."}],[{"start":297.09999999999997,"text":"Bedard says the people she spoke to were excited by doing more with AI. Brain fry comes from feeling like a “kid in a candy store”, she says. “People were spinning up so many threads that . . . they spent more time managing the work than [doing] the work,” she says. “It’s easy to get lost in the opportunity.”"}],[{"start":313.79999999999995,"text":"All is not lost, however. In his essay, Bonacci comes up with a few principles for avoiding paralysis. Most are about slowing down, reading things properly, doing one thing at a time — all things that were useful in more analogue years. "}],[{"start":328.04999999999995,"text":"Interestingly, when I asked him how his thinking had evolved he said he had become more convinced that productivity bottlenecks lay with humans. He sees the solution as “flipping the dynamic — having agents prompt us: surfacing the right decision at the right moment, keeping us focused, stopping us from drowning in optionality.” "}],[{"start":347.4,"text":"I didn’t find this terribly reassuring: doesn’t it risk sidelining the human worker and increasing the likelihood of cognitive decline? Yes, says Bonacci. But he adds the group he worries about most is people at the beginning of their careers “who never got the pre-AI reps . . . you can’t direct an agent well if you’ve never done the underlying work”."}],[{"start":368.45,"text":"Productivity gains, as he wrote in his article, were “never the real bottleneck”. What it takes to actually get stuff done is “focus, judgment, finishing, knowing what to build and why”. All skills that need to be developed by actual people over the course of a career."}],[{"start":383.75,"text":"Five top stories from the world of work"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

1. ‘You’ve got to achieve things quickly’ lessons from a decade of leading London: UK news has been wall to wall with parliamentary drama this week. With prime ministerial shelf lives getting ever shorter, I enjoyed this take on more sustainable leadership from the capital’s mayor Sadiq Khan.

2. Women at the sharp end as AI takes over administrative roles: A fascinating account of why female-dominated fields may be more vulnerable to automation, with plenty of thought-provoking insights into the history of clerical work.

3. Amazon staff use AI tool for unnecessary tasks to inflate usage scores: How does incentivising AI in the workplace really shift how people work? This dispatch shows it may not change employee behaviour for the better.

4. Labour’s turmoil is now uncontrollable: This week’s threats to Britain’s prime minister are at heart a crisis of leadership, so I couldn’t resist including a take on Sir Keir Starmer’s woes here. “All ambition is cruel because office finds you out.”

5. Will AI turn us all into hipsters and artisans? Could AI slop increase the value of crafted human work? Maybe, but other scenarios — like concentrated wealth forcing us to compete for the selection of an elite — should not be overlooked.

"}],[{"start":387.25,"text":"One more thing . . . "}],[{"start":390.25,"text":"I’ve loved Gwendoline Riley’s novels for years and her latest The Palm House, did not disappoint. As usual, Riley nails the cruelty and carelessness people (or mothers and men) are capable of, but this book is more generous than her previous ones, tenderly capturing the solidarity and friendship her characters offer each other. It is also probing on the disappointment and instability of work, as its characters grapple with a change of management at the literary magazine they have given their lives to. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":426.75,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1778903684_3688.mp3"}