There Are Three Types of AI Users
David Brooks
AI makes work more intense and pushes people to do more, not less. Those who thrive will be the ones who work hard and use AI to grow their thinking. Success in the AI age depends on wanting to learn and putting in mental effort, not just being smart.
12 Jul 2026
Researchers from ActivTrak analyzed the digital activity of more than 10,000 workers and found that when people adopted AI, their work life became more intense, not less. The time that these early adopters spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled. Their use of business software rose by 94 percent.
The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks. AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day. Every hour feels more crowded, but also more frazzled. The ActivTrak researchers found that the time people spent on focused, uninterrupted work fell by 9 percent. There’s even a name for this mental state: “AI brain fry.”
AI is going to push low-effort people out of the zone of optimal difficulty. One research team led by Nataliya Kosmyna from the MIT Media Lab found that people’s brain connectivity declines by as much as 55 percent when they are using ChatGPT compared with when they are not using it to perform similar tasks. Vivienne Ming, a co-founder of Possibility Sciences, found that when people were using AI, their gamma-wave activity—a sign of cognitive effort—dropped by roughly 40 percent.