AI in the Workplace Part 2 of 3
Part 1 examined how AI is reshaping workplace demands, from the way employees complete tasks to how they learn, collaborate, and make decisions. While AI can improve efficiency, we also explored why human expertise, critical thinking, and cognitive ergonomics remain essential for ensuring technology supports, rather than undermines, effective work.
AI at Work: Hidden Demands of an AI-Enabled Workplace
Cognitive Offloading: When AI Starts Doing the Thinking
There is a difference between using AI to support your thinking and using AI instead of thinking.
Cognitive offloading occurs when people use external tools to reduce the mental effort required to perform a task. Humans have always done this. We use calendars instead of remembering every appointment and calculators instead of completing every calculation mentally. Generative AI significantly expands what can be offloaded because it can participate in activities such as idea generation, information retrieval, reasoning, writing, and problem-solving.¹
Cognitive offloading is not inherently negative. In many situations, it allows employees to reserve their limited mental resources for more important work.
The concern arises when employees consistently offload the very cognitive processes they need to maintain or develop.
Research involving knowledge workers using generative AI found reductions in reported critical-thinking effort in some circumstances and identified the possibility of over-reliance when users had high confidence in AI.² Importantly, the current evidence does not establish that generative AI inevitably causes long-term loss of critical-thinking ability. However, it does raise an important ergonomic question about how work should be designed so that AI reduces unnecessary cognitive burden without removing opportunities to practise valuable human skills.
How AI Affects Workplace Stress and Employee Well-Being
AI affects more than productivity. It also influences how people feel about their work. For some employees, AI brings relief by reducing repetitive tasks and freeing time for more meaningful work. For others, it creates stress, uncertainty, and concerns about job security or the value of their expertise.³˒⁴
A common concern is technostress, which occurs when people struggle to keep up with new or changing technologies. With AI, employees may feel pressure to learn new tools quickly, adapt to new workflows, and keep up with continuous technological change. This can contribute to exhaustion, frustration, and lower job satisfaction when organizations do not provide adequate support.
Professional identity is another important issue. Many workers take pride not only in the final product they create but in the expertise required to create it. If AI increasingly performs parts of that process, employees may question where their own contribution begins and ends.
There may also be a social dimension to this change. If employees increasingly ask an AI assistant a question instead of asking a colleague, or complete individually what previously required a team, organizations may need to think about the informal interactions that disappear alongside those efficiencies. Emerging research is beginning to examine how employee-AI collaboration affects workplace relationships, but this evidence base remains relatively new. It is therefore too early to conclude that AI is broadly reducing workplace collaboration.
Still, from an ergonomics perspective, the question matters because work is not only a collection of tasks. Work is also a social environment.
The Physical Ergonomics of AI-Enabled Work
Even though AI is a digital tool, it does not remove the physical demands of computer-based work. Employees still spend long periods sitting, typing, reading screens, and switching between programs while using AI systems. Prolonged occupational sitting and sedentary work remain important ergonomic concerns.⁵
AI may create an additional consideration: what happens to the natural movement that was previously built into work?
An employee might previously have walked over to a colleague to ask a question, attended an in-person discussion, searched through physical material, or stepped away from the computer while another part of a task was completed. Increasingly, multiple parts of a workflow can occur without leaving the same screen: ask AI a question, generate a draft, revise it, summarize another document, create an email, and immediately begin the next task.
At present, there is not sufficient peer-reviewed evidence to conclude that generative AI specifically reduces postural breaks or increases sedentary behaviour. That distinction is important. However, we already know that prolonged sedentary computer work is an occupational health concern, and workplace interventions containing digital components can help reduce sedentary behaviour.⁵
As AI enables employees to accomplish more without physically leaving their workstation, the relationship between AI-enabled productivity, screen time, movement, and postural variation deserves much closer attention.
The same applies to screen exposure more broadly. Generative AI does not exist separately from digital work; it is another layer within it. Employees may move between AI assistants, email, documents, web browsers, communication platforms, and other software throughout the day. Digital ergonomics therefore needs to consider not only the design of individual technologies but the cumulative experience of spending increasingly large portions of work within interconnected digital environments.
Why Ergonomics Matters in the Age of AI
Today’s ergonomics includes physical, cognitive, organizational, digital, and increasingly social factors that shape how people work and how well they perform.⁶˒⁷
The central ergonomic question surrounding AI is therefore broader than whether the technology is useful.
We need to ask what happens to the whole job when AI is introduced.
What happens to workload when individual tasks become faster? What happens to learning when AI performs foundational tasks? What happens to judgment when workers begin supervising outputs they may not have had enough experience to produce themselves? What happens to collaboration when AI becomes an increasingly capable work partner? And what happens physically when even more of the workday can be completed without leaving the computer?
These questions do not mean that organizations should avoid generative AI. The evidence demonstrates meaningful opportunities for productivity, creativity, information access, and work support. Instead, they demonstrate why AI implementation should be considered a work-design issue, not simply a software decision.
Generative AI is making many workplace tasks easier, but easier tasks do not automatically create easier jobs.
As AI becomes integrated into everyday work, it is changing who employees work with, how they learn, where they direct their mental effort, how much they may be expected to accomplish, and potentially how much of the workday can be completed from a screen. Some of these changes offer significant benefits. Others raise questions that workplaces and researchers are only beginning to understand.
Perhaps the most important shift is therefore in the question we ask. Instead of simply asking “Can AI do this task?”, organizations may also need to ask: “What happens to the worker and the rest of the job when it does?”
That is where ergonomics becomes particularly important. The goal is not to slow technological progress, but to understand how technology changes the entire work system so that productivity gains do not unintentionally come at the expense of learning, judgment, collaboration, movement, or employee well-being.
In the next blog, we will explore evidence-based strategies employers can use to respond to these emerging demands and support healthier, more sustainable AI-enabled work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is cognitive offloading, and how does AI affect it?
Cognitive offloading occurs when people use external tools to reduce the mental effort required to complete a task. Generative AI expands this capability by supporting activities such as writing, reasoning, information retrieval and problem-solving. While cognitive offloading can improve efficiency and free up mental resources, excessive reliance on AI may reduce opportunities for employees to practise and develop important cognitive skills. Current research has not established that AI inevitably causes long-term declines in critical-thinking ability.
How can AI contribute to workplace stress?
Generative AI can introduce new sources of workplace stress, including pressure to learn unfamiliar technologies, adapt to changing workflows and meet evolving productivity expectations. This technology-related stress, often called technostress, may contribute to frustration, exhaustion and reduced job satisfaction when employees lack adequate support. AI adoption can also create uncertainty about job security, professional identity and the value of employees’ expertise.
Does using AI at work increase sedentary behaviour?
Current research has not established that using generative AI at work directly increases sedentary behaviour. However, AI can enable employees to complete more tasks within the same digital environment, potentially reducing opportunities for movement throughout the workday. Prolonged sitting and limited postural variation are already recognized ergonomic concerns in computer-based work, making physical activity and workstation design important considerations as organizations adopt AI.
Why should employers consider ergonomics when implementing AI?
Ergonomics helps employers understand how introducing AI changes the demands of work, including cognitive workload, physical activity, collaboration and employee well-being. Rather than evaluating AI solely by its productivity benefits, an ergonomic approach considers how the technology affects the entire work system and the people performing the work. This broader perspective helps organizations identify potential risks, preserve important human capabilities and support healthier, more sustainable ways of working.
In part 3 of our blog we will explore further how AI is affecting today’s workplace.
References
- Tankelevitch L, Kewenig V, Simkute A, Scott AE, Sarkar A, Sellen A, et al. The metacognitive demands and opportunities of generative AI. In: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery; 2024. doi:10.1145/3613904.3642902.
- Lee HP, Sarkar A, Tankelevitch L, Drosos I, Rintel S, Banks R, et al. The impact of generative AI on critical thinking: self-reported reductions in cognitive effort and confidence effects from a survey of knowledge workers. In: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery; 2025. Article 1121. p. 1-22. doi:10.1145/3706598.3713778.
- Soulami M, Benchekroun S, Galiulina A. Exploring how AI adoption in the workplace affects employees: a bibliometric and systematic review. Front Artif Intell. 2024;7:1473872. doi:10.3389/frai.2024.1473872.
- Martínez-Córcoles M, et al. The role of artificial intelligence in improving workplace well-being: a systematic review. Businesses. 2024;4(3):389-410. doi:10.3390/businesses4030024.
- Parés-Salomón I, Señé-Mir AM, Martín-Bozas F, Loef B, Coffey A, Dowd KP, et al. Effectiveness of workplace interventions with digital elements to reduce sedentary behaviours in office employees: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 2024;21(1):41. doi:10.1186/s12966-024-01595-6.
- Shah IA, Mishra S. Artificial intelligence in advancing occupational health and safety: an encapsulation of developments. J Occup Health. 2024;66(1):uiad017. doi:10.1093/joccuh/uiad017.
- Lindholm M, Reiman A, Tappura S. The evolution of new and emerging occupational health and safety risks: a qualitative review. Work. 2024;79(2):503-521. doi:10.3233/WOR-230005.
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