What If AI Just Helps Us Waste Time Faster?

I was sitting next to a woman on a plane recently who was the head of HR for her organization. We started talking about AI, and she told me she had been asked to come up with an AI project for the business.

There was just one problem. She had no idea what the project should be.

So she asked AI.

I had to laugh. Here was a senior leader being asked to find something for AI to do, rather than starting with a business problem and asking whether AI could help solve it.

I suspect versions of that conversation are happening in organizations everywhere right now. There is enormous pressure to have an AI strategy, launch an AI project and demonstrate that the business is embracing the technology. I understand why. No leader wants their organization to be left behind.

But the conversation on that plane made me wonder whether we’re starting in the wrong place.

McKinsey recently published research that found 80% of respondents said AI had improved their individual productivity, yet only 37% attributed any impact on company earnings to their organization’s use of AI.

That’s a significant gap. People are getting faster. Tasks are getting easier. Work that once took hours can sometimes be completed in minutes. Yet businesses aren’t necessarily seeing the same level of benefit.

I think part of the reason may have very little to do with AI.

You Can’t Automate Chaos

My concern is that organizations will automate work without first asking whether that work needed to happen in the first place.

If someone spends five hours every week producing a report nobody really needs, AI might help them produce it in 30 minutes. That is more efficient, but we still haven’t asked why we are producing the report at all.

The same is true of meetings. AI can help prepare the agenda, summarize the discussion and create the follow-up. All useful things, assuming the meeting needed to happen in the first place.

You can’t automate chaos.

This is why I think we need to subtract before we automate. Look at the work first. Find the things that no longer need to happen, simplify what remains and then decide where AI can genuinely help.

It sounds simple, but we don’t do enough of it. Organizations are very good at adding. We add technology, processes, reporting, meetings and initiatives. We are much less comfortable going back and asking what can come off the list.

AI gives us a very good reason to start.

What Happens to the Time We Save?

There’s another part of this conversation that interests me just as much.

If AI does what we hope it will do and gives people significant amounts of time back, what happens to that time?

We already know how good organizations are at filling available capacity. A meeting disappears and another one takes its place. A process gets faster and another task gets added. Someone finds an hour in their week and, before long, that hour has disappeared into email, administration or another priority.

I see this constantly in my work around Time Poverty. When people have too much to do and too little capacity, the urgent starts deciding where their time and attention go. Unless we make deliberate choices about reclaimed time, there is a good chance we will simply fill it again.

McKinsey makes an interesting point in its research. Many organizations have focused AI on making individual tasks more efficient, while a much bigger opportunity may lie in redesigning how work moves across an organization.

That makes sense to me. Making one person faster won’t necessarily improve performance if they are still sitting in unnecessary meetings, navigating complicated processes or waiting three days for a decision.

AI can create capacity. We still have to decide what that capacity is for.

This Is Where I’d Start

Performance by Design is about understanding how work is really happening and being much more intentional about where our time, attention and energy go.

Applied to AI, that means I wouldn’t begin by asking, “What can we automate?”

I’d start by looking at the work itself.

What should we stop doing altogether? What could be simplified? Where are meetings, interruptions, administration or slow decisions consuming capacity? Where could AI genuinely remove friction?

Then, once we know AI can give people time back, there is one more decision to make: where do we want that time to go?

For some organizations, that might mean more time with customers. For others, it could mean strategic thinking, solving difficult problems, developing new ideas or simply giving people enough uninterrupted time to do important work properly.

And perhaps we don’t need to fill every minute we reclaim.

That may be one of the biggest opportunities AI gives us. We can use it to do more and move faster, of course. But we can also use it to rethink some of the work we’ve accumulated along the way.

I’m excited about what AI can make possible. I just don’t want us to take one of the greatest opportunities we’ve had to reclaim time at work and use it to make already overloaded organizations even busier.

Subtract what doesn’t need to be there. Simplify what remains. Then decide where AI can help.

And when it gives people time back, decide what that time is for.