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Management

9 Questions for Yourself: Are You Using AI – or Is AI Using You?

11 min read

Not long ago I was putting together a proposal for a new client. The amount was unusual, the terms – likewise. My gut said: go with X, you know this market. But I decided to “check” with Claude. The model produced a well-reasoned answer with a different number – 15% below my estimate. It sounded convincing. I changed the number.

A week later the client signed without negotiation. And instead of satisfaction, I felt annoyed: what if my original number would have gone through too? I’ll never know – because at the moment of decision I suppressed my own judgment in favor of the algorithm’s “statistically grounded” answer.

This is the very pattern that Anthropic’s researchers call Disempowerment – loss of control. Not dramatic, not obvious. Just a quiet swap of “I decided” for “AI suggested.”

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9 Questions for Yourself: Are You Using AI – or Is AI Using You?
AI Doesn't Save Time – It Compresses It: 8 Months of Observations
11 min

AI Doesn't Save Time – It Compresses It: 8 Months of Observations

Companies are worried about getting employees to use AI. The promise is seductive: AI will handle the drudgery – document drafts, information summarisation, code debugging – freeing up time for higher-value work.

But are companies ready for what happens if they actually succeed?

Researchers at Stanford conducted an 8-month observational study of roughly 200 employees at an American tech company that had rolled out generative AI. The company didn’t mandate AI use – it simply provided corporate subscriptions to commercial tools. Employees decided for themselves whether to adopt them.

The result was paradoxical. AI didn’t reduce work. It intensified it. Workers moved faster, took on more tasks, spread their work across more hours in the day – often without any explicit external pressure. AI made “doing more” possible, accessible, and in many cases internally rewarding.

Strikingly, the same pattern shows up in other research. Microsoft found that 62% of product managers use Gen AI daily, yet while 81% say AI saves time, 56% deny that effort has decreased. A paradox? No – a pattern.