The sales pitch for generative AI was a dream. It was going to be the ultimate productivity hack, the magic wand that would finally slay the dragon of boring, repetitive work. The AI would handle the first drafts, the meeting summaries, and the routine emails, freeing up our teams for the deep, strategic, creative work that actually moves the needle.
And companies bought in, big time. 97% of business owners believe tools like ChatGPT will be a good thing for their business.
But now, a weird and troubling reality is setting in at a lot of companies. Instead of feeling liberated, many of your best people just feel…busier. They’re trapped in a new kind of digital hamster wheel: prompting, reviewing, editing, and fixing the endless stream of content the AI churns out. They’re spending more time babysitting the machine and less time thinking.
This is the new productivity paradox: the very tool that was supposed to save us time is just making us more frantic.
This happens when leaders mistake AI-generated activity for actual human productivity. You’re celebrating the volume of stuff the AI creates, not the value of the problems your team solves. Escaping this trap requires a total rethink of how you weave AI into your workflows.
The “Good Enough to Be Annoying” Trap
One of the biggest drivers of this paradox is that a lot of AI-generated content is just “good enough.” It can write a report that’s 80% correct, which sounds great. But as any writer or analyst knows, that last 20% is the hardest part.
Hunting down the factual errors, the weirdly robotic phrasing, and the logical gaps in an AI’s work requires intense focus. It forces your employee to switch from being a creator to being a critic. That constant context-switching is exhausting and can actually take more mental energy than just starting from scratch. The result isn’t less work; it’s just a new, more annoying kind of supervisory work.
Drowning in a Sea of AI-Generated Noise
Generative AI lets you create content at a scale that was previously unimaginable. Your marketing team can now generate 100 social media posts in the time it used to take to write five. Your sales team can blast out thousands of “personalized” emails a day.
This feels like productivity, but it’s often an illusion. It’s just more noise. The marketing team is so busy reviewing and scheduling the 100 posts that they have no time to think strategically about the campaign. The sales team is buried under a pile of low-quality replies from their email blast instead of having a few deep conversations with real, high-intent prospects.
In this scenario, the AI isn’t a productivity tool. It’s a distraction engine, pulling your team away from the work that creates real value.
How to Actually Get Productive with AI
To escape the paradox, you have to shift your focus from the AI’s output to the human’s outcome. The goal isn’t to generate more stuff; it’s to create more value with less human effort.
- Automate the Scut Work, Not the Good Work: Instead of using AI for tasks that are creatively fulfilling (like writing a strategic plan), use it for the tasks that are pure friction. Use it to extract data from PDFs, summarize long research reports, or clean up a messy spreadsheet. Eliminate the work no one on your team wants to do, and you’ll free up real capacity for the work they love.
- Go for 100% Automation, Not 80% Augmentation: For certain tasks, “good enough” is a trap. Instead of using AI to create a “first draft” that a human has to fix, find narrow, repetitive tasks where the AI can be 100% autonomous. Think invoice processing or data entry. This truly removes work from your team’s plate, rather than just changing the nature of it.
- Measure Outcomes, Not Activity: Stop tracking how many articles are produced or how many emails are sent. Start measuring the things that matter to the business. Did the sales cycle get shorter? Did customer satisfaction go up? Did we reduce the error rate in our financial reporting? Focus on results, not volume.
Conclusion: It’s Just Not a New Way of Working, It’s a New Way of Thinking
Generative AI can be the most powerful productivity tool ever invented, or it can be a massive distraction. The difference isn’t in the technology; it’s in the strategy. By focusing on solving real problems and freeing your team from true drudgery, you can escape the productivity paradox. You can build a culture where AI makes your team not just busier, but genuinely better, more strategic, and more impactful. That’s how you get to 10X everyone.