AI brain fry is real. Here’s what’s causing it | Julie Bedard

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hue.

It's only natural to have mixed feelings about the use of AI at work. There's often guilt, confusion, and anxiety that comes with it. AI expert Julie Bedard says this discomfort is normal. She also says that the sea change facing modern workplaces is inevitable.

One issue is that many people are experiencing the transition in silos, working with their agents outside of their teams.

Julie Bedard (0:35)

This person by person job redesign, it can create individual productivity, but it doesn't scale. Let me give you an example.

One well-seasoned manager I spoke to recently said, my team is producing 10x more output, 10x faster, yet my job feels 20x harder.

Elise Hu (0:55)

In her talk, Julie recounts the research she has done on organizational structures. She found that despite increased productivity with AI, many managers report feeling less connection and cohesion. According to Julie, AI integrations should happen as a team. Our human workflow habits need just as much attention as the machines were incorporating. How to make that happen is coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the day.

Julie Bedard (1:34)

Does anyone else feel no matter what you think about AI, it just feels a little bit wrong? You use it, you're afraid you're cutting corners. You don't use it, and you feel you're missing out. You're anxious, you get dismissed. You're optimistic, you get side-eye. Everything is just a little bit off. I've been advising executives and board leaders for the last several years on how to integrate AI into work. Sitting in room after room, company after company, I can tell you it's not just you. This confusing feeling, it's a symptom of something bigger. AI is already redesigning work.

Leadership teams, they're either frantic or frozen, spinning up too much change all at once in an uncoordinated way, or letting all of us do individual DIY of our own job redesign. This person by person job redesign, it can create individual productivity, but it doesn't scale. Let me give you an example. One well-seasoned manager I spoke to recently said, my team is producing 10x more output, 10x faster, yet my job feels 20x harder. This manager felt she was more lonely, not more collaborative. The output sometimes was better, sometimes was worse. I talked to lots of managers. It wasn't just this one manager. Lots of people feel this way. My key message to you, AI will dramatically reshape more than half of jobs in the coming years. So this was never a question of whether we redesign work. This was always a question of how, how we lead through that redesign. I'm going to take you through three areas today where I feel we particularly need leadership in the redesign. I'll walk through some examples of how we might address this. Attention, accountability, apprenticeship. First, attention. My colleagues and I have been studying the experience of working with AI.

One senior engineering manager said, it's like having a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention. I was working harder to manage the tools than to solve the problem. This is BrainFry, not burnout, something different. It results from the acute oversight of AI tools. It's mental fog, slower decision making, more errors. Workers who experience BrainFry report 39 percent more major errors. They're also 39 percent more likely to intend to leave. Your most active AI users are at risk of walking out. No one set out to create BrainFry.

It happened because we piled tool on top of tool on existing workflows without removing work or thinking about it as a team. The work we added was often cognitively more demanding.

So what do we do about it?

We need to redesign work and workflows as teams with outcomes in mind. We need to engage managers. I know managers already have a lot on their plate. But when you have managers answering questions about AI for employees, mental fatigue scores are 15% lower. One company thought through this and started to redesign job descriptions, naming the more strategic work. They took out handoffs that were no longer needed. They created a broad upskilling plan. All of this was done in concert, not individually, one by one. Second, accountability. Companies are putting AI agents on org charts. They're giving them names, job titles. We were curious. We ran an experiment. Same document, same errors. Only difference, who we said the drafter was. In one group, an AI tool, in one group, an AI employee, in the third group, an actual employee. For managers who were already familiar with the concept of AI agents on org charts, personal accountability fell by nine percentage points when they reviewed work done by an AI employee.