Stephanie Hughes

Is AI making us more efficient or just wearing down our brains?

For American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

The promise of artificial intelligence is it'll take on all the boring tasks we don't want to do and free us up to do the fun, high-level thinky work.

But managing the AI tools can be its own kind of work.

A new study from the Boston Consulting Group found that when workers have to closely monitor and manage their AI tools, it can cause cognitive exhaustion.

They dubbed this AI brain fry.

Matt Kropp is a managing director and senior partner at BCG.

He's one of the co-authors of this new study.

Yeah, you have this really evocative description in the study from one engineering manager who wrote, instead of moving faster, my brain just started to feel cluttered.

It was like I had a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.

I caught myself rereading the same stuff, second guessing way more than usual and getting weirdly impatient.

What do you think was happening to this person?

Yeah, I was thinking about this.

Managing humans is also challenging.

What's different about managing AI agents?

We'll be right back.

You're listening to Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

We're back with Matt Kropp, Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group.