75% of workers say AI makes them more productive - but more than half have skipped it because oversight is too draining, and most employers aren't tracking the cost
DOVER, DE / ACCESS Newswire / July 9, 2026 / Artificial intelligence is delivering on its core workplace promise: people are getting more done. But newly released data from Getsolved suggests the productivity story carries a cost few companies are measuring - one that may be quietly eroding the very gains AI is meant to deliver.
In a survey of 3,000 professionals aged 18 to 29 who use AI daily, 75% said it had made them more productive and 60% said it helped them work faster with less effort. Yet the same workers described a pattern researchers are calling "AI brain fry": cognitive fatigue from the constant work of monitoring, verifying, and correcting AI output.
The data of Gen Z AI use:
75% say AI has made them more productive (24% significantly)
52% have avoided AI because supervising it felt too mentally draining
36% report near-daily mental fog or trouble focusing
41% need a full evening of rest to recover from an AI-heavy day
51% say their employer does not address the mental load of AI work
For employers, the economics are where it gets complicated. If a tool helps an employee finish 20% faster but leaves them noticeably more drained the next day, the net gain isn't obvious. The survey points to a broader shift the research community has been tracking: mental fatigue and cognitive strain have now overtaken workload volume as the leading predictors of burnout. In other words, the way people work with AI may matter more to retention and performance than how much work they're given.
The avoidance figure carries the clearest bottom-line implication. A majority of these workers - the demographic most fluent with the technology - are making a practical calculation that supervising AI often isn't worth the time it saves. One in four Gen Z said AI producing wrong information has actively made their jobs harder, and others cited the need to fact-check everything as the core friction: not that AI is occasionally wrong, but that it could be wrong at any time, so every output needs review. For companies investing in AI tooling, that's a direct line to underused licenses and stalled adoption.
Meanwhile, organizational support hasn't kept pace with rollout. Only 39% of workers said their employer genuinely tries to manage the cognitive impact of AI, while one in ten said their employer is pushing for more AI use without acknowledging the cost at all. With 41% reporting anxiety about AI at work, the gap between adoption and support is widening.
There's also a longer-term capability question. Of all the skills Gen Z workers said AI helped them develop, memory ranked lowest, with fewer than half reporting improvement. When AI summarizes, stores, and retrieves information on a person's behalf, retention can quietly erode - a trade-off whose downstream effects on workforce capability are still being studied.
"Companies have been measuring AI adoption in tasks completed and hours saved. This data says that's only half the ledger," said Harry Southworth, Head of AI Development at Getsolved. "If oversight fatigue pushes workers to quietly stop using the tools you're paying for - or leaves them too drained to perform the next day - the return on that investment looks very different."
The gains come with a cognitive cost most organizations haven't begun to quantify. As AI moves from novelty to infrastructure, the companies that treat verification burden and oversight fatigue as measurable line items - not soft concerns - are the ones most likely to capture the productivity they're betting on.
The full data set, including recovery times, symptom breakdowns, and employer response, is available inthe full findings of the AI platform.
About Getsolved
Getsolved is a global, multi-detector AI writing-integrity platform that helps people check, humanize, and improve text with confidence. It offers a comprehensive suite of advanced writing tools - an AI Detector, AI Humanizer, Plagiarism Checker, Grammar Checker, Fact Checker, Paraphraser, and Summarizer.
The platform goes beyond generic AI detection: its high-quality tools refine text without destroying its original meaning, grammar, academic citations, or factual accuracy, helping users produce work that is cleaner, clearer, and easier to trust.
Company Details
Company Name: Getsolved
Contact Person: Chloe Bennett
Email: chloe@wmb-digital.com
Website: https://getsolved.ai/
SOURCE: Getsolved
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