Good morning. For years, corporate tech leaders have been deploying AI tools inside their organizations with the hopes that it will increase employee productivity and give them more time to focus on higher-level tasks.

And in some cases, that idea has borne fruit. But for many employees, continually encountering a barrage of nascent, foreign and constantly changing tools has left them feeling overwhelmed and overworked. That’s according to new research from executive search firm Korn Ferry, which published its third annual global workforce survey this month. 

“We’re still in the curve where the tools are adding burden as much as they’re providing efficiency,” said Bryan Ackermann, Korn Ferry’s head of AI strategy and transformation.

Korn Ferry surveyed more than 16,000 professionals—from entry-level all the way through C-suite—across 11 major markets, including the U.S., U.K., Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the U.A.E.

Irrespective of the introduction of new AI tools, 62% of respondents said they already felt like their workloads had increased significantly in the last few years. 52% of respondents said AI tools had increased the number of tasks expected in their roles.

“When you combine already overworked employees now having to learn to use a tool, you get more overworked employees, not more productive employees,” Ackermann said. 

This initial productivity dip, sometimes known as a J-curve, isn’t surprising and is in some ways a necessary step toward ultimately achieving bigger gains down the road once employees get comfortable with the tooling, Ackermann said. 

But part of the problem is that some organizations aren’t necessarily taking the right strategies to dig themselves out of the trough. More support, trainings and upskilling seem like a good solution, but often simply add more burden, he said.

The real solution starts with making sure you’re carving out time in an employee’s daily job. For example, that includes giving them an extension on existing projects to make sure they have the bandwidth to focus on learning. Then it’s important that any trainings are really personalized and role-specific rather than generic.

“I recognize that’s not always easy. It takes work in the organization to clear enough of the decks for that to happen. But that’s why this is a leadership challenge,” Ackermann said.

• The rapid adoption of Meta Platforms’ Muse app reignited fears that AI will disrupt the financial-services industry, contributing to a selloff Tuesday in shares of wealth-management firms, brokerage houses and even big banks, The Wall Street Journal reports. The tremors mimicked a similar selloff earlier this year when financial-technology firm Altruist unveiled a tool that aimed to create personalized tax strategies. But analysts say Muse, which has already partnered with the likes of PayPal and fintech firm Plaid, has a broader potential to change many basic aspects of consumer payments, financial planning, insurance coverage and more. 

• Plus, Meta faces plenty of hurdles in making Muse a major success, WSJ reports. It is already facing scrutiny over privacy concerns, and Amazon.com in recent days blocked Meta’s AI agent from shopping on its site. Analysts say competitors are expected to launch their own versions of Muse in the near future.

• Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled a faster and cheaper version of its flagship AI model that it also billed as its “safest,” in its first release since its chief executive called on the industry to slow down technology development, the New York Times reports. The company said the model, Opus 5.5, was the strongest performer on its most rigorous internal safety tests to date, and was less likely than earlier models to take actions that couldn’t be undone, or to act outside the limits it was given.

• Alibaba has rolled out its most powerful chip yet, doubling down on its bid to control the software and hardware that power its AI ambitions, WSJ reports. The new AI chip—the Zhenwu V900—outperforms its predecessor by a significant margin, Chief Executive Eddie Wu said Tuesday. With larger GPU memory and bandwidth, its performance is three times better than the chip Alibaba released just four months earlier, signaling companies’ push to accelerate development as competition intensifies.

• Storied venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million in an unaccredited San Francisco-based two-year alternative to traditional college for students ages 16 to 22, WSJ reports. Though named the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, the school will operate as an independent business led by Gagan Biyani, co-founder of the ed-tech platform Udemy.

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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute’s new Executive Resilience series, where she’s profiling America’s top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

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Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

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