The Productivity Paradox

Every week for years, the corporate lawyer had to spend a dozen hours flipping through discovery documents, looking for patterns and legally relevant content. Then came gen AI, and the lawyer was able to cut those dozen hours in half, thanks to agents that can spot patterns, pull out excerpts by topic, and identify potential lines of arguments. But overall, her weekly work hours have not decreased. She still logs fifty-five hours a week.

AI was supposed to bring a massive rebalancing of work hours to corporate America. The professions that have historically logged the longest hours—such as lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, and tech developers—were expected to see their hours drop considerably. But most say something else quite odd is happening: The time certain tasks require has been cut sharply—but overall working hours haven’t changed. “I have yet to talk to anyone who has cited AI as reducing their hours,” says Karena Man, senior client partner in the Technology and Digital practice at Korn Ferry. 

To be sure, overall productivity figures have mildly increased—by 2.8%, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—but not, apparently, due to AI. A study tracking 10,584 workers in the six months before and after AI adoption found that work time increased across every measured category (such as email and collaboration); the average length of focus time decreased by 9%, according to data from ActivTrak. Experts say that AI is reducing the time spent on repetitive and mundane tasks, like calendaring appointments and editing documents. But the promise that the technology would shorten work hours hasn’t come to pass.

In the short term, two factors are preventing AI from decreasing weekly hours. Companies are slowing (and in some cases ceasing) the hiring of entry-level workers to handle tasks like document review and basic data sorting. This means that even though employees may save time on their own tasks, they no longer have support workers—and their overall hours remain unchanged. This is a particularly pressing issue in medicine, where AI tools can create chart notes. “If it generates documents that the physician has to check, it can actually increase physicians’ time,” says Li Ern Chen, market leader in the Physician Workforce Solutions practice at Korn Ferry.

At the same time, learning to harness AI has become a time-consuming task in and of itself. “No one is working shorter hours, because it takes even longer to educate oneself on how to use AI,” says Chad Astmann, co-head of global investment management at Korn Ferry. He predicts that norms and AI ecosystems will eventually emerge, and and that employees will no longer have to figure things out on the fly—but that’s in the future. For now, learning how to use AI involves both deploying it and also working through its unexpected complications: For example, if patients and customers are better able to resolve their own issues at home, professionals will likely see more complex cases. “This can be cognitively and emotionally exhausting,” says Chen.

More crucially, corporate roles, it turns out, do not suddenly shrink in overall hours. A 44-hour-a-week job is still a 44-hour-a-week job, with or without AI. “Capturing time savings requires redesigning jobs,” says Bryan Ackermann, head of AI strategy and transformation at Korn Ferry. “We’re finding that that’s not happening organically.” Historically, organizations have rarely been incentivized to lower the weekly hours of salaried staff. 

Experts across a half dozen fields say that at this juncture, shorter hours are not in the cards at most organizations. At the same time, they warn firms against piling on more work. In the best-case scenario, workers will have the time to fully address everything on their to-do list, as well as accomplish tasks like keeping up with industry advances and working on complex cases. “You will no longer have people doing spreadsheets until 3 AM anymore,” says Astmann. “But you will have people doing value-added work for clients at 3 AM.” 

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