Nearly two out of three professionals now say they are doing the work of more than one role, and half blame AI tools for part of that extra load, according to a recent survey from Korn Ferry. That finding matters because it contradicts the entire pitch behind buying AI tools in the first place: save time, cut busywork, free people up for better things.
The same survey found a gap in how people at different levels see this. Most CEOs say AI has made their company more efficient, but barely half of individual contributors, the people actually doing the work, agree. Leadership sees the promise. Staff feel the extra work.
Part of the reason is a problem researchers have started calling "workslop." A study by BetterUp Labs and Stanford researchers found that AI-generated reports, slides, and emails often look finished but are not, so whoever receives them ends up spending time fixing, checking, or redoing the work anyway. Instead of eliminating a task, the AI just moves it downstream.
Dropbox surveyed professionals and found that more than half now start new work with an AI assistant, but only about one in ten get a finished result straight from it. Nearly three out of four workers say they manually shuttle AI output between different apps at least three times in an average day. That shuttling is its own kind of tax on attention, since jumping between tasks and tools makes it harder to focus and easier to feel drained by the end of the day.
Separate research from BambooHR estimates that workers now spend close to half of the time they put into AI simply correcting its mistakes or rewriting prompts to get a usable answer. That is not time saved. That is time reallocated from doing the work yourself to babysitting a tool that does it wrong first.
This is the backdrop for Google's advice on "zero-based calendaring," the idea of wiping your schedule clean and only adding back what you would genuinely say yes to today. It is a sound habit, borrowed from the same logic as clearing out an overstuffed closet: you cannot tell what is worth keeping until you see everything removed. Labeling days around themes, so client calls, product work, and coaching all get their own slot, also cuts down on the mental cost of constantly switching gears.
But a personal calendar fix cannot solve a workload problem created at the company level. Research from Workday found that when companies see time savings from AI, they are more likely to plow that time straight back into more tasks than to invest it in training people or redesigning roles. In most organizations, fewer than half of jobs have actually been rewritten to reflect what AI can now do, so employees are stuck squeezing new tools into old job descriptions.
Burnout is not a soft cost either. The World Health Organization estimates it drains $322 billion a year in lost productivity globally. A better calendar helps one person breathe easier. Fixing the underlying mismatch between what AI promises and how jobs are actually structured is the harder, and more valuable, work still waiting to be done.