Winning the AI Productivity Paradox
The future of work isn't about competing with AI. It’s about rediscovering what makes work meaningful in the first place.
AI’s usefulness as a personal productivity tool is obvious to the 61% of people internationally who have used it. Even institutionally, AI is starting to bear fruit, with jobs data analysis from Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson suggesting a 2.7% productivity gain in the 2025 US economy, doubling the 1.4% annual average for the past decade.
Yet the big debate remains whether AI is judged to be good because it will eliminate costly drudgery at work or bad because it will kill off millions of jobs.
Maybe the answer is both. It will free people to do better work by rewarding curiosity and creativity, while challenging organizations to rethink how they develop and deploy talent.
What Is the Meaning of Work?
Max Ehrmann’s 1927 poem Desiderata elegantly declares principles of a good and meaningful life. Its third stanza advises us to “keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.” Work, in this view, is not so much toil as purpose.
The history of technology and productivity is a story of new inventions eliminating old tasks, and in the process creating new work. Consider agriculture. In 1940, the work of one American farmer fed 20 people. Today, that figure is 160. The work may be less manual, but is it less meaningful to be a farmer today with telematics,smart irrigation, and AI tools for crop health monitoring?
Or take the case of consumer banking and ATMs. Bank teller was once a coveted entry-level position for workers seeking a safe, professional career path. ATMs swept the world, and many assumed bank tellers were toast, but they didn’t disappear. Rather, many spent their newly freed-up time helping customers with loans, savings advice, and other services. The tasks changed and for many the job became even more meaningful.
The same dynamic is happening with software developers, whose productivity is expected to surge with the help of AI tools. Fear about job security is not unreasonable, but for developers curious enough to stretch their work into UX design, data strategy, and workflow modeling, less time on repetitive coding means more time thinking creatively about software as a product.
Growing – Not Splitting – the Work Pie
A recent Harvard Business Review article details the findings of two researchers who spent eight months studying how AI changed work habits within a small tech company. Its main finding was that AI “intensifies” work, rather than reducing it.
Three specific kinds of intensification emerge:
- Task Expansion – AI can, for instance, generate a decent first draft strategy document, allowing an enterprising product manager to step into work that previously belonged to engineering – like vibe-coding a quick prototype to test if an idea is viable.
- Blurred Boundaries Between Work and Rest – Prompting ChatGPT and going to lunch seems easy since the work is done automatically while you’re on break. This applies to weekends, evenings, and other free time because it feels good to make progress without “doing” the work.
- Multi-Tasking – AI makes it possible to work multiple threads simultaneously: ask a question, switch to another task, return to finished work. For ambitious workers, this capability is hard to resist since progress and learning move faster when tasks are completed in parallel.
The net effect is that workers embracing AI achieve more, move further and faster than they have in the past, and in the process gain new areas of mastery. For Max Ehrmann, AI would probably look more like a career boost than a threat.
AI Favors the Curious, Creative, and Caring
Operations leaders know about task automation opportunities in planning, sourcing, and logistics workflows. But the benefits won’t come from firing 30% of your team. They will come from applying AI to intensify work and help people grow their expertise and impact.
For those who are curious about how things can improve, creative in their approach to the job, and caring about their careers, AI is good news. For the rest, headcount reductions via attrition or redundancy are a reality.
So yes, AI will destroy jobs, but it will also make many jobs better.