Do you think AI is actually reducing work?

Do you think AI is actually reducing work?

It is certainly reducing the cost of producing work. Analysis that took days can now be generated in minutes. Code appears in seconds. Ten scenarios can be created where previously there might have been two.

But something interesting happens next.

Organizations rarely take that productivity gain and simply stop. They ask for more analysis, more variants, more scenarios, more recommendations, more output.

The bottleneck does not disappear. It moves.

Before AI, scarcity often sat with the people producing the work. Increasingly, it sits with the people who must review it, prioritize it, make decisions, and act on it.

That is the AI Work Paradox.

AI can make every producer more productive while simultaneously increasing the amount of work flowing toward managers, reviewers, architects, editors, and decision-makers.

Which leads to a very different AI productivity question:
Not: How much more can we produce with AI?
But: How much additional intelligence can the organization actually absorb and convert into value?

In the latest edition of Technology Bytes, I explore why AI may be shifting the real constraint from production capacity to absorption capacity, why “hours saved” tells only half the story, and where those saved hours actually go.

The AI Work Paradox: The Real Constraint Is Absorption