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It was supposed to give you your afternoons back.
That was the promise of AI at work. Let the software draft the email, sum up the meeting, sort the spreadsheet, and you would finally have room to breathe. For a lot of people, the software really did get faster. The room to breathe never showed up.
A new global survey puts numbers on that feeling. Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2026 report asked more than 16,000 professionals in 11 countries about their jobs, and 52% said AI tools have increased the number of tasks expected of them. Not reduced. Increased. If your AI workload feels heavier than your old workload did, you are not imagining it, and you are very far from alone.
What the survey actually found
The main figures are blunt:
- 62% say their workload has grown significantly over the past two years.
- 61% say they are now doing the work of more than one role.
- 44% feel stretched beyond what they are capable of at work.
- 45% say they are too busy to deliver meaningful results.
That last one is worth a pause. Almost half the people surveyed are not saying they are lazy, or unmotivated, or bad at their jobs. They are saying the opposite. They are so busy that the work that actually matters is not getting done.
Korn Ferry’s own people did not soften it. “Adding more technology without expanding workforce capacity clearly is not the answer,” said Roger Philby, who leads the firm’s people strategy and performance work, as reported by Human Resources Director.
The strange part: AI is working
Here is the detail that slipped past most of the coverage. In the same survey, 63% of employees agreed that AI has made them more efficient.
So both things are true at once. Most people say the tools make them faster. More than half say the tools gave them more to do. The efficiency is real. It just is not landing with the person who gained it.
Where does it go? Mostly into expectation. When a report that took a day now takes an hour, nobody hands you back the rest of the day. The next report arrives. Then the one after that. The speed you gained quietly becomes the new normal, and the new normal becomes the floor.
This is not a new pattern. In 1865 the English economist William Stanley Jevons pointed out something odd about Britain’s coal. Steam engines had become far more efficient, so you might expect the country to burn less coal. Jevons argued it would burn more, because making something cheaper to use tends to make people use more of it. Your working hours, it turns out, can behave a lot like that coal.
When jobs are cut, the work stays
There is a second reason the load keeps growing. As companies reorganise around AI, roles get cut or merged. The survey found the work those roles did rarely disappears. It gets handed to whoever is left.
That is where the 61% comes from: people carrying their own job plus a slice of someone else’s, often without the title, the pay or the training to match. Only just over half of workers told Korn Ferry they feel properly trained on the AI tools they are now expected to use.
Some people answer the pressure at home by taking an actual second job, which comes with its own hidden costs. We worked through the real math of taking on a second job separately. But a lot of people already have a second job. It is just hidden inside the first one.
Motivation is paying for it. Korn Ferry found employee motivation fell by nine percentage points in a single year. Lesley Uren, chief executive of Korn Ferry Consulting, put it plainly in coverage by HR Dive: “Growth doesn’t come from just asking people to do more.”
The oldest advice about this exact problem
There is a very old story about this, and it is surprisingly practical.
It is in the Bible, of all places. Moses is leading a whole nation through the desert, and he has taken on the job of settling every dispute himself. Every quarrel, every hard question, every matter between one person and another comes to him. People stand waiting to see him from morning until evening.
His father-in-law, Jethro, comes to visit. He is an outsider, not even from the same people, and he watches Moses work for a day. At the end of it he asks the obvious question nobody on the inside had asked. Why are you doing all of this alone?
Moses gives the answer most of us would give. Because the people come to me. It had simply become his job.
Jethro’s reply would fit neatly into the Korn Ferry report. You will wear yourself out, he tells him, and the people waiting will wear out too. This is too heavy for one person. You cannot do it alone. Then he offers the fix: find capable, honest people to handle the everyday cases, and bring only the hardest ones to Moses.
Notice what he did not suggest. He did not tell Moses to work faster. He did not hand him a better system for hearing more cases per hour. He told him to admit a limit and share the weight.
And notice who Jethro said would benefit. Not only Moses. The people waiting in line would go home in peace, too. The overload was never costing just the worker. It was costing everyone the work was meant to serve, which is exactly what 45% of today’s workers are saying when they report being too busy to do anything meaningful.
Whoever kept that story thought it belonged in the same book as the story of God. As if how a person carries their work, and whether anyone notices when it has become too much, was never a separate subject.
What you can actually do about AI workload
You probably cannot change your company’s staffing plan. But a few things are within reach for almost anyone, and none of them cost money.
- Write down every role you are actually doing. Not your job title. The real list. Seeing “my job, plus half of a colleague’s, plus checking the AI’s work” on paper turns a vague heaviness into something you can talk about.
- When something new arrives, ask what comes off. A simple “Happy to take this on. Which of these should move down the list?” names the trade-off without refusing the work.
- Decide where saved time goes before it is gone. If a tool saves you an hour, choose in advance what that hour is for: finishing on time, a real lunch, one piece of careful work. Time you do not claim gets claimed by someone else.
- Let an outsider look. Describe your week to a friend who does not work with you. People inside a system stop seeing it. Someone standing to one side can often see it in a day.
- Check where you really are. Our free Am I Burned Out at Work? quiz takes a few minutes and helps tell an ordinary busy season apart from real burnout.
And when you do win an evening back, you may find you have forgotten how to use it. That is common, and there are reasons for it. We looked at why it is so hard to relax even when you have free time.
The tools will keep getting faster. That was always going to happen. The question worth asking is whether the time they save ever comes back to the person doing the work. For now, for about half of us, it does not. Noticing that is not complaining. It is the first honest step toward carrying the right amount.
What do you think?
If AI lets a task be done in half the time, who should get the time it saves: the company, the worker, or the customer? There is a fair case for each. Tell us where you land in the comments.
Share this
- AI was supposed to lighten the load. A survey of 16,000 workers says 52% got more tasks instead. So it’s not just me: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/ai-workload-half-of-workers-added-more/
- Strangest stat I’ve read this week: 63% of workers say AI made them more efficient, and 52% say it gave them more work. The speed is real. It just never comes back to the person who saved it. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/ai-workload-half-of-workers-added-more/
- There’s an old story where Moses’s father-in-law watches him work for one day and basically says: this is too heavy for one person, get help. Still the best workload advice I’ve come across. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/ai-workload-half-of-workers-added-more/
Questions people are asking
Is AI increasing workloads for workers?
For many workers, yes. Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2026 Global Insights Report, a survey of more than 16,000 professionals across 11 countries published in September 2026, found that 52% of employees said AI tools have increased the number of tasks expected in their role. The same survey found that 62% reported significantly heavier workloads over the past two years, and 44% said they feel stretched beyond their capabilities at work.
Why does AI make people busier instead of freeing up time?
When a tool makes a task faster, the time saved is often absorbed by new expectations rather than returned to the worker. Korn Ferry’s 2026 workforce survey found that 63% of employees said AI made them more efficient, while 52% said AI tools added to their tasks. The economist William Stanley Jevons described a similar pattern in 1865, arguing that more efficient steam engines would lead Britain to use more coal, not less.
What happens to the work when jobs are cut because of AI?
The work is usually redistributed rather than eliminated. According to Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2026 survey, when roles are cut or restructured around AI, the underlying tasks tend to pass to the remaining staff. In the same survey, 61% of employees said they now perform the responsibilities of more than one role.
How can I manage a heavier workload without burning out?
Steps that cost nothing include writing down every role actually being performed, asking which task should move down the list whenever a new one arrives, deciding in advance how any time saved by tools will be used, and describing the workload to someone outside the job, who can often see the problem more clearly than someone inside it. A short self-check such as a work burnout quiz can also help separate an ordinary busy season from genuine burnout.
What is the Jevons paradox?
The Jevons paradox is the observation that making a resource more efficient to use can increase total consumption of it instead of reducing it. It is named after the English economist William Stanley Jevons, who argued in his 1865 book The Coal Question that more efficient steam engines would lead Britain to burn more coal. The idea is now often applied to technology, energy use and working time.
