This yr, I’ve been constructing an AI social media manufacturing pipeline to advertise the 25+ exhibits on the Autistic Culture Podcast Network. It took me every week of effort, however I managed to program Claude Code to speak to NotebookLM, which now feeds our YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok pipeline, and a job that used to take me a full day now runs within the background. The primary time I ran an actual batch by it, I felt the guilt of all the time being behind fade away. I may bodily really feel my nervous system recalibrating. Perhaps for the primary time since I used to be 10 years outdated, with these synthetic intelligence brokers, I may recapture the sensation of not being behind!
After which, the opposite shoe dropped. The subsequent week, the automated processing didn’t work. I needed to rebuild the agent from scratch. In the meantime, I used to be in the midst of constructing my subsequent agent to ship out press releases when new exhibits launch, however that obtained placed on maintain. At about 3 a.m., I used to be in a full-on AI coding haze once I ran out of credit and had no selection however to go to mattress. At that second, I noticed all this time I used to be making an attempt to avoid wasting through the use of AI was positive taking over a variety of time.
Enterprise tradition has one instrument for measuring AI, and it’s the stopwatch. Productivity!
Minutes saved. Output multiplied. Tasks accomplished. Income up.
Each dashboard asks how a lot quicker the corporate is transferring. Are we working much less, although? As a result of I, for one, have been working extra and with a panic about not being left behind. Getting extra completed just isn’t the identical as making the work day much less demanding.
The hole issues much more for neurodivergent founders like me. A report published in June by the U.K.’s Lilac Centre, primarily based on a nationwide survey of greater than 600 neurodivergent entrepreneurs, discovered that 76% began their companies particularly to work in a manner that suited them, however 79% report workload-management or burnout challenges because of this.
The identical report calls AI and digital instruments “accessibility scaffolding,” and I’d again that up. I even wrote a book manner again in 2023 about how AI might be used as an accessibility device for neurodivergent individuals. I take advantage of AI each day to start out duties I’d in any other case stall on, to show scattered considering right into a structured draft, to get previous the executive-function wall that exhibits up when my monotropic movement just isn’t flowing within the instructions I want it to. I don’t query that AI can take duties off your plate. However, what I missed in my e-book, and I feel others are lacking, is the price of utilizing AI.
Name it the Automation Tax. It’s all the additional work you must do to make the AI make your job go quicker, and the expectation that now you are able to do issues quicker, you continue to want to make use of each working hour to get much more completed. The velocity obtained turned up, however the workload didn’t lower.
Constructing the Autistic Tradition Podcast Community pipeline taught me the scale of that tax. Wiring three methods collectively, studying the place every device tends to fail so I do know what to double-check; none of that confirmed up in an “hours saved per publish” calculation.
In the meantime, my workload by no means appeared to lower. The hour saved was full of the following job, as a result of quicker output means extra time to plan and promote. As a substitute of writing my magnum opus or studying Italian with the time I saved, I discovered myself managing extra brokers.
For this reason once I use a device now, I ask three questions. What actual job disappears? What new work exhibits up as an alternative? And do I actually find yourself with fewer issues to handle, or simply various things?
A single AI-drafted Instagram caption may save me solely 5 minutes, nevertheless it removes the dread of watching a clean field till the second to publish has handed; for a job that small, that’s a wonderful return. In the meantime, producing 5 newsletters within the time it used to take to put in writing one nonetheless leaves 5 newsletters to fact-check, schedule, and defend if one thing in them is mistaken. Output goes up, positive, however so does the workload.
If I can’t reply that final query: Do I actually find yourself with fewer issues to handle or various things, then the device has simply shifted and even elevated the workload.
The most effective AI device isn’t the one which helps you produce essentially the most. It’s the one which frees you as much as do extra of what you wish to do.
