A quick note:
For the last year, you've been telling me what you like, what you don't, and what you want more of. I listened. Here's what I built.
The AI Advantage is your new Wednesday edition of The Artificially Intelligent Enterprise. One AI-powered business advantage per week — with a copy-paste Prompt of the Week, actionable insights, and the exact tools to put it all to work.
Take 30 seconds and fill out the survey below. Your answers shape what I cover first.
Thanks for the support. I hope you find this helpful.
-Mark
THE AI ADVANTAGE
An MIT Media Lab study found that regular ChatGPT users showed the lowest brain engagement of any group tested — and underperformed peers at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. The kicker: the more they used it, the worse it got. If AI is intensifying your team's work and degrading their thinking, the case for intentional boundaries isn't optional — it's urgent.
AI isn't saving your team time — it's filling every second you freed up.
Harvard just proved what your team already suspects. A UC Berkeley study published in Harvard Business Review tracked 200 employees over eight months and found that AI tools didn't reduce workload — they intensified it. Faster pace, broader scope, longer hours. Workers did it to themselves — voluntarily.
Here's the number that should stop every leadership team cold: developers using AI were 19% slower while believing they were 20% faster. That's a 39-point perception gap between what your people feel and what's actually happening. And an Upwork survey found 77% of employees said AI actually increased their workload.
The researchers have a name for the fix: an "AI Practice." Not a policy. Not a playbook. A set of intentional norms — like work sequencing, built-in pauses, and human checkpoints — that prevent productivity tools from becoming burnout engines. The leaders who build this now will keep their best people. The rest will wonder why everyone's exhausted.
TRY THIS NOW
Build your team's AI Practice in 10 minutes.
Bring the output to your next team standup. Ask one question: "Are we using AI to do more — or to do better?"
Set one AI boundary this week. Examples: "No AI-drafted emails after 6 PM." "All AI research gets 10 minutes of human review before sharing." One rule. Start there.
PROMPT OF THE WEEK
Copy this into Claude or ChatGPT. Paste your team's recent AI output. Get a burnout risk score in 60 seconds.
Review this AI-assisted output from my team's past week. For each item, flag:
- Any tasks that expanded beyond the original scope
- Any work completed outside normal business hours
- Any deliverables where human judgment was replaced by AI-generated defaults
- Any signs of context-switching overload or parallel AI threads
Then rate our overall AI burnout risk from 1–10 and explain your reasoning. Recommend 3 specific boundaries we should set this week.Forward this to your COO with one line: "We need to talk about this before Q2 planning."
P.S. I ran this prompt on my own calendar last week. The burnout score was a….never mind, it doesn’t matter. I'm taking Friday off.
Your AI Sherpa,
Mark R. Hinkle
Publisher, The AIE Network
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