Is AI making us busier? Ask around and you'll hear two stories. One says AI will leave us with nothing to do. The other, the one I keep seeing, is that everyone who uses it is working harder than ever.
Alan put it plainly in a recent video: the people he knows who use AI are busier than they have ever been. They're working evenings. They're working weekends. They're getting more done and they look more productive. Nobody is out of a job. Everyone is out of time.
More done isn't the same as getting somewhere
None of this is a complaint about AI being useful. It is. Emails get drafted faster, reports come together in minutes, and a task that took an afternoon now takes twenty minutes.
But Alan's question is the one worth asking in your own business. Is it making their lives better? Is it making their jobs better? And are they moving towards an objective?
His answer is no. They are getting more done and looking more productive, but not necessarily heading anywhere in particular. Output went up. Direction didn't.
Why everyone's AI heads in a different direction
Think about how most teams use AI today. One person has a favourite prompt. Another has built their own way of writing proposals. A third asks the AI for the same thing in a completely different style. A supplier does it a fourth way.
Each of them is productive. But they are all pulling in different directions, because nothing in the AI tells them how your business does things.
That is the real answer to whether AI is making us busier. It isn't the tool, it's the lack of a shared direction. Without one, you get more activity, and activity is easy to mistake for progress.
What this means if you run the business
If you're an owner, a director or a manager, you already have the missing piece. Every well-run business has a way of doing things: "this is how we do things here." Step A, step B, step C, and then the same result for the customer every time. We call these business systems.
The idea Alan explains in the video is simple. Point everyone's AI at those systems, through the tools you already use, and everyone is working towards the same objective instead of their own version of it. The busyness stays, but it starts to add up to something.
Think of Ford's factory floor. The point wasn't that everyone worked harder. It was that everyone built towards the same car, to the same standard, every time.
A question to ask your team this week
You don't need a project to start. Ask the people around you one thing: "What is the AI you use actually helping you get towards?"
If the answer is a clear objective that ties back to how your business works, you're in good shape. If the answer is "it saves me time," or a shrug, you've probably got plenty of activity and not much direction. That's worth knowing, and it's fixable.
Where to go next
This post only covers the problem. For the full idea behind the fix, read What Is Object-Based AI? (replace with the live link), and watch Alan's full video, Prompts Don’t Matter Anymore: The Future Is Object-Based AI.