Ray Smith

We're seeing a lot of these announcements roll out this year, this week even.

We're not necessarily seeing sort of like the big league, like we haven't heard from a Harvard business school yet, but you know, we can see a lot more schools going this way.

What's changed is AI.

No one's quite sure what the future workplace is going to look like with AI.

And so the cost of going to business school is already so expensive.

When you throw AI in the mix and what it may potentially do to the future workplace,

People are questioning whether that's an investment they want to make, and schools are very aware of this.

Some of these schools are saying that they're offering these discounts or scholarships precisely because they feel like some workers out there already have had their jobs disrupted by AI.

And so the schools are saying, not only are we going to give you a discount, we're going to give you these programs that will help you if you've been displaced or if you're just feeling lost because AI is moving so fast.

And so basically the conclusion was that AI doesn't necessarily create as much efficiency as many had hoped.

What it instead does is replaces that with even more work and different kinds of work, but more work nonetheless.

They looked at digital activity 180 days before and after people started using these tools on the job.

And it's interesting because the time they spent on things like email and messaging and even chat apps, that more than doubled.

And even things like using business management tools, that rose.

And the amount of time that people devoted to, like, focus work, in contrast, declined.

And so employees were either working at faster paces or taking on broader scopes of tasks.

After they had done their original work, if you will, with AI, they just found more work to do.

And sometimes it involved work that was beyond their job descriptions.

You know, the dream goal is AI will free us up to do more, you know, creative work or engaging work or more thoughtful work.

And this study is showing that that's not quite happening yet.