The Productivity Mirage.
Exploring how AI could either liberate human work into creativity and impact—or reduce us to hypervisible but hollow performers.
You are busy. And yet, are you productive?
You deliver output. And yet, are you making an impact?
You probably gather information — a whole lot of information — from multiple screens, big or small. Emails, instant messaging, video calls give you the illusion of being on top of things.
If you work 8 hours a day, about 5 hours are spent on “work about work” (meetings, emails, status updates). Count yourself lucky if you spend more than 1 hour doing some “real work”. As a matter of fact, a 2024 Economist Impact showed that a staggering 42% of knowledge workers report that they typically don’t spend more than one hour on productive, uninterrupted work before an interruption pulls them away. Add AI to that already tech-heavy environment, and multiple variables could be distorted, starting with job scopes and performance metrics.
Job scopes
The workplace will likely face two distinct scenarios.
Scenario 1: The positive path
Job characteristics remain identical. Companies leverage AI to:
Speed up and automate mundane tasks
Free up time for their people to think collaboratively and creatively
The impact? Operational KPIs improve, people feel empowered, and jobs gain meaning. Skills and aptitudes are liberated, giving work a social and human dimension.
Scenario 2: The traditional path
Technology revolutions leading to job scope evolutions, companies see AI as an opportunity to further “task-ify” work. Dashboards may look impressive, but value creation stagnates. Operations run more smoothly, yet business revenue gains remain uncertain.
Most employees end up disgruntled, frustrated, bored, or some combination of the three. Past research (Autor, Levy & Murnane, etc.) shows that automating routine tasks can either free humans for creative work or trap them in reactive monitoring — a cautionary tale repeating itself today.
Performance metrics
How a job is structured directly shapes how performance is perceived — and how AI amplifies both opportunities and pitfalls.
Intangible work rarely counts in today’s appraisals. In the positive scenario, performance measures expand beyond reactive output. In the traditional scenario, they are reduced to hyper-responsiveness and hyper-visibility.
The “star performer” becomes a hyperperformer: hypervisible, hyperresponsive, and hyperengaged across company messaging channels. However, Gallup (2023) found that high engagement does not automatically translate to high performance — especially when engagement is activity, not impact.
Instead of creating augmented workers, we risk building a community of subtracted employees — visible as pixels on a dashboard, but hollow where autonomy and reflection should live.
Nobody knows yet which scenario will prevail. But from a human perspective, there is a clear choice — the “thinking window” we are in now.
Ultimately, the future workplace could have human employees as:
Passive monitors, validating AI’s thinking
Active orchestrators, using AI to validate their own thinking
It is up to us to decide whether the dynamics of the technology-humanity relationship will be reversed. Or not.
The AI journey has barely started. Will we let it manage us, or will we manage it — shaping a future where humans orchestrate AI, not the other way around?