AI was supposed to make our work lighter. Fewer routine jobs, more time for the real work. But look around and you often see something else: people working faster, keeping more balls in the air and firing off one more prompt in the evening. Research from 2026 confirms that picture. Below, we look at what AI does to your team's energy and what you can do as a leader so that AI gives your people energy rather than draining it.
AI makes the working day fuller
Researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye of the Haas School of Business (UC Berkeley) spent months following how employees at a tech company worked with AI. Their conclusion in Harvard Business Review is striking: AI didn't reduce work, it made it more intense. People started working faster, took on extra tasks and more often kept working outside their normal hours, usually without anyone asking them to (HBR, February 2026).
At first that sounds like good news. Who doesn't want a more productive team? But the researchers warn that this pace is often unsustainable. They see work quietly expanding, with fatigue, burnout symptoms and poorer decisions as a result. The speed you gain now can cost you good people later.
Brain fry: when your head is full
A second study, by researchers from Boston Consulting Group among almost 1,500 employees, gives this phenomenon a name: AI brain fry. By this they mean the mental fatigue that arises when you have to use or check AI tools more than your mind can handle. People find it hard to concentrate, make decisions more slowly and get headaches. And that has consequences: more mistakes, decision fatigue and a greater inclination to leave (HBR, March 2026; BCG).
But the same research also contains good news. Where AI takes over routine, repetitive tasks, people actually experience fewer burnout symptoms. So how you use AI matters, and as a leader you have a say in that.
Why this is about work engagement
Engaged employees are bursting with energy, dedicated to their work and completely absorbed in it. Wilmar Schaufeli, the founder of work engagement research in the Netherlands, calls this vigor, dedication and absorption (Schaufeli, What is engagement?). Look at the AI studies through that lens and you see exactly where it chafes:
- Vigor. Brain fry eats energy. Anyone who has to check AI output all day has little left at the end of the day.
- Dedication. If work only gets more and faster, the feeling that you are contributing something meaningful disappears. People end up doing the work mainly because they have to.
- Absorption. Being absorbed in your work requires a calm mind. Constantly switching between tools and tasks makes that almost impossible.
Work engagement arises when the sources of energy in the work outweigh what the work demands of you. AI can end up on either side of that scale. If it takes over boring routine work, it is a source of energy. If it becomes an extra layer of work you have to monitor, it is an energy drain. Also read burnout vs work engagement for the difference between those two sides.
Managers are running out of energy too
In its State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, Gallup shows that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the lowest level since 2020. Among managers themselves, the fall was even bigger: from 27% to 22% in a single year. Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy around 10 trillion dollars in productivity (Gallup).
That is worrying. The people who have to help their teams switch to AI are under pressure themselves. And a manager who is running on reserve can hardly look after the energy of their team. If you want your team to stay engaged while working with AI, look first at how your managers are doing, and only then at the tools.
Satisfied with AI is not yet engaged with AI
Ask a team whether it is happy with the new AI tools, and the answer is often yes. The tools work and things go faster. But being satisfied with a tool says nothing about the energy at the end of the week. A team can be very satisfied with AI and still slowly run out of energy because of it. You only see that when you measure work engagement.
The outside world works with AI too
The studies mostly look at your own team. But your customers and partners are using AI as well. Paul van Heeringen of IMPACT on the Job saw this at a large insurer. More and more complaints and claims were coming in that had clearly been made with AI: up to seventy pages of legal-sounding text, which by no means always matched how things really stand legally. For the customer, it apparently felt good to send such a document. But the legal staff on the other side got a huge pile of extra work. Because every customer deserves attention, so those seventy pages have to be read for each customer too.
So work that other people produce with AI also lands on your desk. Teams that take their customers seriously are the first to feel it.
Five ways to make AI a source of energy
- Let AI do the boring work first. Start with the routine jobs that nobody gets energy from. According to the BCG study, that is where AI takes the most pressure off.
- Agree how you work with AI. The Berkeley researchers argue for what they call an "AI practice": shared agreements about when you use AI, when you pause and which work deliberately remains human work.
- Monitor the workload, not just the output. If the team is doing more than last year, ask not only what it delivers but also what it costs. Time saved by AI doesn't automatically have to be filled with new work.
- Give people room to shape their own work. People often know best which tasks AI can take over and which ones actually give them energy. That is job crafting in a new guise.
- Ask how people are really doing. A satisfaction score tells you little about brain fry. Ask how much energy people have left and whether they still enjoy their work. Then listen to the answer.
Know where the energy in your team is
AI is here to stay. So the real question is whether it gives your people energy or drains it. You can't see that difference in the production figures, because they often go up at first. You only see it when you look at your people's work engagement.
With the Employee Engagement Survey by Leiders.nl, you see per team how much energy, dedication and engagement there is, and how employees experience leadership. That way you know where AI is helping your team and where it is time to adjust, before the energy drains away.
