AI causes cognitive fatigue. Here's how to work with more haste and less speed

Staff who use AI may find themselves with more work, not less.

Think carefully about what tools you use and why.

Adopt a set of standards and refine your results.

The promise of increased productivity through AI may come with unwanted secondary stress. The Harvard Business Review found that AI doesn't reduce work; this intensifies it, leading to cognitive fatigue and unsustainable schedules.

While the common perception is that AI can help reduce workload, allowing employees to focus more on higher value and more engaging tasks, HBR research found that staff using AI worked faster and often found themselves with more to do, not less.

Ankur Anand, group CIO at tech recruiter Harvey Nash, said professionals who want to avoid cognitive fatigue need to understand how to use AI effectively and its potential risks.

“This focus will help reduce the noise around the workload that AI creates,” he told ZDNET, suggesting that many people have unrealistic expectations about the productivity boost that AI will bring.

“A lot of organizations are saying to their people, ‘We want to understand what impact you’re having with AI,’” he said. “But these professionals are not empowered, which means using AI adds a lot of pressure, as they have to prove themselves on their own terms.”

If you want to get the most out of AI at work, you'll need to strike an effective balance between completing tasks quickly and producing high-quality work.

Here's how experts think professionals can ensure they're reaping the benefits, not the problems, of AI – and they suggest you'll need to focus on three main areas: tools, guidelines and results.

Limit your toolset

Alex Read, senior product manager for data at energy provider EDF UK, told ZDNET that the best way for professionals to reap the benefits, not the challenges, of AI is to focus on tools that help you deliver value in your roles.

Although there are thousands of potential AI-based services on the market, Read said sane professionals are limiting their horizons.

In his own role, for example, Read focuses on how AI can help him build a data platform and update information accurately, efficiently and productively: “Anything outside of that scope is noise to me. »

This sentiment was echoed by Nick Pearson, CIO of technology specialist Ricoh Europe, who told ZDNET it was important to step back and think carefully about how an AI tool can help you deliver value in your role.

“If you think about the phrase ‘AI generation,’ the technology is by definition very effective at generating results,” he said. “I could go to bed at night, run the model, and we could produce four new IT strategies overnight.”

However, quantity does not necessarily equal quality. Pearson suggested that it's important to focus on AI's blind spots, especially since most models are trained on pre-existing content.

"AI can't inspire people per se; it can't naturally create something new, because it's actually quite recursive," he said.

“And the judgment that sometimes needs to be made, above all else, whether it's an ethical judgment or a judgment of capability, is not automatically present in technology.”

It's in this gap, Pearson said, that human experts play a critical role: "We're playing with that concern as an organization and saying, 'Where does AI really play an important role, versus where are we upskilling people in areas that AI probably won't play for a long time?' »

To correct this problem, HBR said companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around the use of AI that help professionals ensure they use AI in a constrained but productive way.

At EDF UK, Read is part of an internal AI Center of Excellence in Business IT, which helps develop policies to effectively use AI across the organization.

In addition to Read, who contributes from a data usage perspective, the group includes other technical representatives, such as the company's senior director of AI, senior software engineer, and senior solutions architect.

“The mission of this center is to ensure that as federated business units seek to create, develop and deploy AI services, they have platforms, guidance, best practices, architectural assets and hardware to guide them on how to safely and effectively adopt AI and operationalize it at scale,” he said.

Some of the key themes the center considers when evaluating AI tools are scalability and reusability, ensuring that a proposed service does not duplicate a service already in use.

“All new AI-related tools and services will go through this hopper and funnel to understand the scope and ensure that the security, regulatory and ethical sides of things are understood,” he said, suggesting that all professionals should use their organization's pre-existing guidelines to drive appropriate exploitation of emerging technologies.

“The benefit of this guided approach is that it allows us to be clear in our messaging about which AI services can be used, how they are used from a use case perspective, and ultimately which people are authorized to use them.”

Louise Newbury-Smith, head of UK&I at technology specialist Zoom, told ZDNET that one way to ensure your results are limited is to focus on the prompts.

"Use simple amendments to be specific, such as 'Give me the three things that have the biggest impact.' This approach should guide your message, rather than saying, 'Give me everything you know about this topic.'

Newbury-Smith said successful use of AI depends on a smart way to harness it, and effectiveness comes down to empowerment and engagement. If a prompt gives too much information, refine it until you get what you need. She said it should still be faster than trying to get answers without AI.

The basic message for professionals is that effective applications of AI require you to stay current, said Bernhard Seiser, vice president of digital, data and IT at AOP Health.

Think before you use AI, and think again before disseminating your results throughout the organization.

"It doesn't help the business if you get AI-generated emails that are multiple pages long, and then you need ChatGPT to summarize the text,” he told ZDNET.

Seiser said that while there are some tasks where generative AI is effective and worth using, ultimately, "you have to use your brain."