The pressure of ‘faster’ in AI-driven workplaces is outweighing the value of deep thinking.
I recently took part in a debate with RMIT Online on this topic and I feel genuinely passionate about the fact that while AI is a great enabler at helping us to become more efficient at our jobs, there are some big costs to that. Here is my argument…
Deep thinking is the deliberate, unhurried cognitive process that produces judgement, not just output. AI doesn't replace that. But the pressure to move faster is quietly making it impossible, and most organisations haven't noticed yet.
Research from RMIT Online tells us that AI gives workers back 9 hours per week. Nine whole hours. That feels like a gift. But who gets to keep that gift? The worker or the employer?
Organisations aren’t going to give us back that 9 hours in our week. They will happily bank that time and then raise the bar. When your colleague produces the same thing in 20 minutes that took you 3 days, that looks like slow performance. We didn’t just save 9 hours, we have filled those 9 hours with 9 more hours of work.
If I think about how this is beginning to impact my industry - Advertising, we used to take 6 weeks to come to a campaign idea - at least 2 weeks for strategy and 4 weeks for the creative team to crack the idea. Now I am doing this with my creative partners in 2-4 days. When speed becomes the norm, organisations restructure around that speed, making slow thinking structurally impossible, not just culturally discouraged.
This matters because, we’re not optimising machines, we are people. AI burnout is a real thing. In fact, recent Harvard Business Review research notes cited that 88% of heavy AI users report increased feelings of burnout. It’s a form of cognitive exhaustion caused by the mental strain of managing, prompting and evaluating AI tools at work. Instead of reducing workloads, AI often accelerates them, leading to decision fatigue, mental fog, and creative numbness.
Bouncing rapidly between code writing, chat windows, and other productivity applications forces your brain into "constant partial attention," which severely drains your working memory, leads to skill erosion and can even lead to a lack of passion or connection to your work.
Because AI speeds up processes, we’re falling into the "More is Better" Trap: employers and individuals often expand project scopes or take on multiple tasks at once. But when you really think about it, people don’t just want things that are merely fast, we want things worth having.
Think about the last time you ordered food delivery. You didn’t just want it fast, you wanted it hot, fresh and delicious. Speed without value is worthless. Nobody leaves a concert thinking: that was great, but I wish it went faster.
The same is true of friendships. Of advice. Of the work that actually changes minds and moves organisations forward. Nobody looks back on a relationship and says: the best thing about it was how efficient it was.
If we define human value purely by output speed, we have already lost the argument for keeping humans in the room. AI will always win that race. But if we define value through judgement, ethics, and what I’d call brain capital, the ability to ask the right question, not just answer it faster, then AI becomes the builder and we become the architects.
How often we are told when trying to make a decision to “sleep on it”? This extra time allows you to step away from the immediate pressure and approach the problem with a fresh, rested perspective. Plus data from a multinational study by cognitive psychologist Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman shows that 72% of us experience their most creative ideas in the shower. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t think I’ll be taking Claude into the shower with me anytime soon!
What we are trading away is not just time for thinking, we are trading away the thinking that builds value and trust. The pause that stops a bad decision. The curiosity that finds the thing the brief didn’t ask for.
The pressure to move faster in AI-driven workplaces is outweighing the value of deep thinking. That's not inevitable, it's a choice. And the organisations that treat deep thinking as infrastructure, not inefficiency, will be the ones still worth working for in ten years.