Is AI Increasing Your Workload? What the New Data Says

It's 7:40 in the morning. The laptop's open before the coffee is done. There's an AI summary of the 43 emails that came in overnight, three drafts waiting for you to "just review," a meeting recap with six action items, and a note from your manager asking if you can take a pass at the deck now that "AI makes it quick."

None of it is hard, per se. That's the trap. Every single piece is fast. And by noon the day is gone and you can't name one thing you actually moved.

That was supposed to be the deal, right? The tools do the busywork and you get your time back. New data from the last few weeks says for a whole lot of people it's working out mad different.

For many workers, the honest answer from the latest data is yes. AI makes individual tasks faster, but the total amount of work keeps growing, and fewer people are carrying it.

Korn Ferry released its Workforce 2026 report on September 8, 2026, based on a survey of more than 16,000 professionals across 11 countries, from individual contributors to CEOs. A few numbers jump off the page:

Motivation dropped too, from 71% in 2024 to 61% in 2026. Korn Ferry calls it "the two-job job," and Fortune ran with that on October 1.

Look at that CEO line again. 79% of CEOs say AI made things more efficient. Only about half of the people doing the work agree. Same tools. Pretty different view from the desk where the work actually happens.

Because when a task gets cheaper, people do more of it. Faster drafts mean more drafts. Faster summaries mean more meetings get summarized and more follow-ups get assigned.

Two Berkeley Haas researchers, Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye, followed about 200 employees at a US tech company from April to December 2025. They wrote it up in Harvard Business Review under a headline that pretty much says it all: "AI Doesn't Reduce Work. It Intensifies It." People worked faster, "took on a broader scope of tasks," and "extended work into more hours of the day," often "without being asked to do so." The authors describe a rhythm where workers "managed several active threads at once" and a sense of "always juggling."

And some of it is being asked. In Workday's global workforce report released October 5, 2026, 40% of business leaders said they expect AI to help them get more from current employees. That's the plan, said out loud. If the time AI frees up isn't claimed, it gets refilled.

Then there's your own brain. Gloria Mark's research in Attention Span found people stay on one screen for about 47 seconds before switching. AI didn't invent that. It just handed us more threads to switch between, and every one of them looks urgent. We covered why urgent tasks keep winning in how to decide what matters most when everything feels urgent.

It mostly looks like a day full of quick things. Nothing takes long, so nothing feels like a reason to say no. This is roughly how the hours fill back up, with the question that cuts through each one.

It goes to whoever claims it first. If you don't name what the hour is for, your inbox, your notifications and everybody else's priorities will name it for you.

That's why so much of this comes down to the first few minutes of the day. We wrote a whole piece on how to take back control of your day before everyone else claims it, and it applies double now. The tools keep getting faster and your mornings are still the same length.

The research on plans backs this up. Psychologists Masicampo and Baumeister found that simply making a specific plan for an unfinished goal reduced intrusive thoughts about it, which frees up the attention those open loops were eating. And a meta-analysis of 94 tests by Gollwitzer and Sheeran found that deciding in advance when and how you'll act had a medium-to-large effect on actually following through (d = .65).

You ask a different question than "what can I get done?" AI is great at answering that one. It has no idea what matters to you, your team, or the people at home.

The Question is a free iPhone app that asks one question every morning: What will make today matter? You answer it in under a minute, before the inbox gets a vote. Midday it reminds you what you said. In the evening it checks in. That's it. It doesn't make a list, and it doesn't add to the pile.

For people living the two-job job, answers tend to look like this:

Notice none of those say "use AI less." The tools can stay. They just don't get to set the agenda. If you want the longer version of why this one question works, start with What Will Make Today Matter? The One Question to Ask Every Morning.

Start small and start in the morning. You probably can't fix your company's AI strategy by Friday. You can decide what your day is for.

If the overload has turned into exhaustion that doesn't lift on weekends, that's worth talking through with a doctor or a mental health professional. A morning question is a good habit, not a treatment.

For a large share of workers, yes. Korn Ferry's Workforce 2026 survey found 52% of AI-weary workers say AI increased their workload, and Berkeley researchers writing in Harvard Business Review found AI pushed employees into more tasks and longer hours. Individual tasks get faster, but the total amount of work often grows.

It's Korn Ferry's name, picked up by Fortune in October 2026, for workers covering the responsibilities of more than one role, usually after layoffs or flattened management. In Korn Ferry's survey, 61% of employees said they're in that spot.

Decide what the day is for before you open the tools. One clear priority, set first thing in the morning, gives you a filter for every fast, small task that shows up after.

No. The Question is a free iPhone app that asks one question every morning: What will make today matter? It reminds you of your answer at midday and checks in at night. You do the deciding.