New reports are raising questions about how the rapid growth of artificial intelligence tools in workplaces is weighing on employees.
The 2026 State of the Workplace report by ActivTrak suggests that compared to 2023, “80 per cent of employees now use AI tools — up from 53 per cent.”
It also found that “disengagement risk rose 23 per cent,” indicating roughly one in four employees are feeling under-challenged with their work.
Some of the types of businesses included in the report are financial services, legal services, insurance and health care, among others. More than 443 million hours of digital workplace activity was gathered across 1,111 organizations and 163,638 employees over the past three years.
And it comes as a Harvard Business Review study warned earlier this month that a phenomenon researchers dub “AI brain fry” is “both real and significant.”
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Researchers in that study defined “AI brain fry” as “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.”
The Harvard Business Review study described brain fry as “intensive back-and-forth with the tools, followed by an inability to think clearly, like a mental hangover, comprised of difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches, requiring several to physically step away from their computer to ‘reset.’”
It was found that 25.9 per cent of employees working in marketing jobs experience brain fry, alongside 19.3 per cent of people in human resources/people operations, 17.9 per cent of people in operations, 17.8 per cent of people in engineering/software development and 16.7 per cent of people in financing and accounting.
The study states that the most mentally taxing form of AI engagement was oversight, with 14 per cent of surveyed individuals expressing “more mental effort on the job.”
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A high degree of AI oversight also predicted 12 per cent more mental fatigue for participants. More intensive AI oversight also predicted 19 per cent greater information overload.
Are employees being ‘under-challenged’?
The ActiveTrak report states that an average of seven AI tools is now being used per organization, up from an average of two in 2023.
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Stephanie Enders, chief delivery officer at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, said that this is a piece of the report that she found to be “really interesting.”
“I think that really to get the most of the tools that you are investing in, that foundational literacy is key,” she said. “So you actually know which tools to select and then what’s that layer of tool fluency that can really ramp up more quickly because you have baseline AI literacy in all roles.”
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“I think it’s less maybe that AI is influencing the behaviour, but it’s probably more amplifying things that are already happening in a given business,” she said.
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There was also a five per cent increase in productive hours, which sits at an average of six hours and thirty-six minutes a day, even as “the average workday shrank two per cent,” suggesting that more work is getting done in less time, the report found.
Collaboration time also rose by 34 per cent and “now accounts for 13 per cent of all productive hours, up from 10 per cent in 2023.”
With surging AI adoption in the workplace, time spent across work applications was found to have increased between 27 per cent and 346 per cent, including a 104 per cent increase in email, a 145 per cent increase in chat and messaging and a 94 per cent rise in business management tools.
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However, the time spent in other areas is falling, including focus.
The ActivTrak report states that “focus efficiency — the share of total work time spent in focused, uninterrupted work — fell to 60 per cent in 2025, a five per cent drop since 2023.”
It was also found that the “average focus session length declined nine per cent — from 14 minutes and 23 seconds to 13 minutes and seven seconds — and focused hours fell an additional two per cent (minus four minutes).”
Despite the rise in AI tools being used in various areas, AI users’ average daily focused time had declined by 23 minutes.
“More employees than ever are chronically under-challenged rather than overextended,” the report states.
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There was also a 46 per cent increase on Saturday “productive hours,” with an average of four hours and thirty-seven minutes. Sunday’s productive hours also rose by 58 per cent.
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“As any new technology diffuses, it’s really important that we have people looking into what are the impacts of it because as we learn more, we can do better and we can make more choices as an individual,” Enders said.
“I’ve seen that AI tools can sometimes hold up as a mirror to the practices that are already happening in your organization,” Enders said.
“So, if things like space for focused activity is limited, AI can be a mirror to that and make it potentially harder to find more focus time, or you’re relying on it to deal with that gap in focus time.”
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