Artificial intelligence should not only help us do more. It presents an opportunity to rethink productivity and reclaim some of the work-life balance technology helped erode.
Artificial intelligence could give us back something technology has steadily taken away. Time may be the most valuable resource we have.
Until now, much of the conversation around AI has focused on productivity. We talk about completing research faster, producing first drafts in seconds, automating repetitive tasks and achieving in hours what may previously have taken days. These are significant benefits. But in leading technology teams, I have become increasingly convinced that productivity alone is an insufficient measure of success. If every hour AI saves simply becomes another hour we fill with more work, we may be missing one of the greatest opportunities the technology presents.
This matters even more after the Covid-19 pandemic. Remote and hybrid working delivered enormous flexibility and demonstrated that many of us did not need to be sitting behind a desk in an office to be productive.
But something else happened at the same time. The boundaries between work and our personal lives became challenging to define and to delineate. The office moved into our homes. Meetings moved onto screens, and messages followed us wherever we happened to be. Many professionals gained flexibility but lost balance, and never completely got it back.
This is where AI presents an interesting possibility because technology may now help us reclaim some of what technology helped take away. It’s a modern-day paradox, but I have seen this as both a technology opportunity and a leadership responsibility. The goal should not be to use AI simply to accelerate an already crowded working day, but to remove low-value friction and create capacity for better thinking, better decisions and more sustainable ways of working.
There are tasks that are necessary but time-consuming. Searching for information, preparing first drafts, putting presentations together and completing repetitive administrative work can consume significant portions of a working day. A task that once required a professional to locate and compare information across several sources can now begin with an AI-supported synthesis. The professional’s time can then be redirected towards testing the answer, identifying gaps and applying judgement.
The principle is straightforward: AI should remove low-value friction, not simply accelerate workloads.
This in turn will allow us to spend more time where human expertise adds the greatest value: thinking critically, interrogating information, making judgements, solving problems and collaborating with other people. Organisations should deliberately reinvest the capacity AI creates in deeper problem-solving, learning and collaboration, rather than allowing every saved hour to disappear into a larger volume of work.
Some of that capacity should also remain personal. It can create room for curiosity and learning, as well as downtime and family time. In busy lives, we must make room for life, and leaders should resist treating every gain in efficiency as an invitation to add more activity.
But none of the benefits AI promises, and has started delivering, can be separated from trust. AI is incredibly fast and powerful. But fast is not the same as right. Speed may be delivered by the technology, but accountability remains human. Before we stand behind an AI-assisted answer, we need to know where the information came from, whether the sources can be trusted, and whether the output contains unsupported or inaccurate information.
These questions become even more important in professional environments such as law, compliance and financial services, where decisions can have far-reaching consequences and trusted information is fundamental. In these settings, responsible adoption requires more than access to AI. It requires clear governance, reliable sources and professionals who know when to challenge an output.
AI does not make human expertise less important. In many respects, it makes it more valuable, because the quality of the outcome depends on the quality of the questions, scrutiny and judgement applied to it.
I deal with financial information and budgets as part of my work, but I am not a finance expert. AI can help me interrogate information, identify questions and understand an issue more quickly. It does not remove the need to take that work to the finance professionals around me and test it against their expertise. That is how I believe AI should be used: to improve the quality of the conversation, not to bypass the people accountable for the decision.
AI has also not necessarily pushed people further apart as some may have feared. In many instances, it has encouraged greater collaboration. We can develop ideas faster and then bring those ideas to colleagues and specialists to interrogate, challenge and improve them. Used well, AI should connect expertise rather than isolate it.
The technology is developing too quickly for professionals to sit on the sidelines and wait for everything to settle. AI fluency is becoming an important professional skill, and organisations need to build that capability beyond their technology teams. Responsible adoption depends on people across the business understanding both what these tools can do and where their limitations lie.
We do not all need to understand how large language models are built. We do need to understand what these tools are capable of, which tools and sources we can trust, where their limitations lie, which tools we can trust and when we need to double-check their work. The people who thrive will not necessarily be those who adopted AI first. They will be the people who learn how to use it well and wisely. The opportunity AI presents is therefore greater than simply getting more done. Used responsibly, it can give us space to think, learn, collaborate and apply the human judgement technology cannot replace. The real test will not be how much more work we can fit into a day. It will be whether leaders use the capacity AI creates to improve decisions, develop people and build more sustainable ways of working. If we do that deliberately, AI may give us something as valuable as productivity: more of our time back.
By
Desigan Naidoo
LexisNexis South Africa
