As the debate over AI’s role in the workplace rages on, some experts warn that eliminating menial tasks with AI could come with a hidden cost to productivity.
In a Financial Times op-ed last year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said AI agents were helping customer service workers resolve more queries and helping programmers write more code.
“This is freeing human teams to accelerate projects and deepen relationships with customers,” he said.
The message was clear: AI is taking on more of the grunt work so employees can do the tasks that matter most.
But in a future where AI absorbs the tasks that make our workdays slightly monotonous—like entering data, organizing our inbox, or updating documents—might we actually miss the boring tasks that break up the work day?
Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and author of the upcoming book The Mental Strength Playbook, told Fortune we just might.
While executives like Benioff tout AI’s ability to free up humans for higher-level tasks, Morin said the boring, repetitive, tasks that office workers complete daily are necessary to give our brains a break.
“We only have so much attention and so much mental bandwidth. And if we’re doing these high-level tasks all day long, we’re going to run out of energy way faster,” she said.
Problem solving may also suffer without these low-effort digressions. Completing an easy, accomplishable responsibility lets workers still feel productive without exerting too much mental effort.
“My concern is that if we think we’re going to be diving in, focusing on solving a problem and focusing on it all day long, your brain doesn’t get that opportunity to get a fresh perspective or to get a break and to come back and look at it from a different angle,” Morin said.
Research from the University of Texas at Austin published in the peer-reviewed journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management found that every five minutes of low-effort, low-distraction pauses, boosted productivity by 7.12%.
Meanwhile, other types of interruptions, like lunch breaks, hurt productivity when workers return to a task. The researchers blamed the discrepancy on focus. When a worker took a lunch break, they mentally disengaged and were forced to pay “cognitive restart costs” when returning to work. But a low-effort pause kept them engaged.
This research lends more credence to the idea that removing undemanding duties from workers’ days may inadvertently strip away the pauses that keep them cognitively locked in.
To be sure, AI has already demonstrated some potential benefits for workers. A 2025 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that, among workers who used AI tools daily, a third said it saved them four hours or more a week. That’s as work-related stress has remained elevated since the pandemic, according to Gallup, while other studies show a majority of workers experience burnout. Saving them some time each week could be a positive.
But burnout isn’t one-dimensional. It can be associated with both constant repetitive work or constantly doing high-level tasks, Jessica Watrous, a licensed psychologist and the chief clinical officer of mental health care platform Modern Health, told Fortune. What might best enhance workers’ cognitive abilities is a balance between the two types of tasks that works within the limits of the human brain.
“Our cognitive load and our ability to kind of store things, it’s pretty stable,” she said. “Just because you have a tool to make you more productive, is your brain fully ready for that?”
