The illusion of AI efficiency
There was a time, not long ago, really, when work meant other people.
You had meetings you didn’t want to attend, conversations in the kitchen that went on too long and a string of half-formed thoughts that somehow became an idea. The pace was slower, yes, and everything took longer than it should have. But there was something reassuring in the process, something human in the way things got done.
Now we call it efficiency, or streamlining. We have dashboards for dashboards, workflows with no visible hands. Automation that’s supposed to lighten the load, and in some ways, maybe it does, but mostly, it shifts it. The work hasn’t disappeared, it’s simply recast itself in a more palatable form and landed, with astonishing subtlety, on the shoulders of one person. You.
Where there was once a team, a designer, copywriter, strategist, someone who knew how to fix the bloody printer, now there is a single figure behind a laptop, trying to be all of them at once. Writing, posting, analysing, scheduling, branding, responding, fixing, building, pretending it’s sustainable. And we believe it is, because the tools suggest so. That’s the seduction, the illusion of AI isn’t just that it’s fast, it’s that it makes you feel like you should be, too. What we call multitasking is often just quiet panic in disguise. And what we call skills are, in many cases, acts of survival. The ability to do twelve things doesn’t mean you were meant to. It means no one else was available. So you learned, in the gaps, on the edge of sleep. You taught yourself what wasn’t taught. You kept the wheels turning because stopping felt like failure. Somehow, in the thick of it, we stopped calling this what it really is: exhaustion and isolation. The slow hollowing of work into something that looks impressive from a distance but feels brittle up close.
I am not rejecting AI, I am naming what's happening. It's a quiet observation. Much of what is celebrated as efficient is actually just hidden. We’re not working less, we’re working alone. With fewer boundaries, less support, and a creeping sense that if we can't do it all, we’ve failed. You haven’t failed. You’ve simply been handed more than one person should hold.
So what do we do with that?
We start by refusing to measure ourselves against the machine. AI is not your colleague, it is not your competition, it's a tool, and like any tool, it requires framing, boundaries, intention. Use it to remove noise, not to replace thinking. Use it to make time, not to erase it. And we need to stop pretending we can design, market, lead, and build alone. Collaboration doesn’t have to mean full-time hires or five-hour meetings. It can mean borrowed skills, temporary teams, reciprocal exchanges. Shared notes, honest chats. Anything that breaks the illusion that working alone is a virtue.When you’re looking at your day and wondering how it got this full, ask yourself one thing: what’s mine to carry? Not what you can do, but what you should be doing, if you had the room. This is why I built the Human-Driven AI (HDAI) framework. To help people do better, to build in intention, to start with people, not platforms. HDAI is how we reclaim the centre of the process, not the output. It gives us a way to ask: what needs a human? And what can be left to the machine?
If we’re going to keep using AI, we need frameworks that protect our time, our minds, and our place in the work. The HDAI framework was designed for exactly this moment. If you needed someone to say it, let this be that. And if you needed to hear it, you’re not the only one.
