The Productivity Cliff: Optimal Tool Count

The more AI tools you use, the more productive you get. Right? 

Not exactly. Boston Consulting Group leader Gabriella Rosen Kellerman studied what actually happens to people who are using AI intensively at work, and what she found is that beyond a certain point, something breaks. Not burnout. Something different, something the existing research wasn't equipped to explain, and something that organisations are currently making worse without realising it. 

In this episode, I sit down with Gabriella to unpack AI Brain Fry: what it is, who is most at risk, and why the sweet spot for productivity might be far fewer tools than you think. We also get into what managers are doing, often unknowingly, that adds 15% more mental fatigue to their teams, and the one cultural message that does more to protect employees than any AI policy. 

If you have ever ended the day feeling strangely depleted despite not having done anything physically tiring, this episode will name what's happening and tell you what to do about it. 

Gabriella and I discuss: 

• What AI Brain Fry is and why it sits outside the existing burnout literature 

• Which roles are showing the highest rates of brain fry and what that signals about AI oversight work more broadly 

• The productivity cliff: why two to three AI tools is the sweet spot, and what happens to output beyond that 

• What the most sophisticated AI users do differently to the people with 25 browser tabs open 

• The two manager behaviours that either cut mental fatigue by 15% or actually increase it 

• Why some common organisational messages about AI are making employees more vulnerable to fatigue, not less 

• The 10/20/70 rule that most organisations are skipping entirely in their AI rollouts 

• How to do an informal audit of whether your team is currently suffering from brain fry 

Key quotes 

"The goal is to develop acute self-awareness of our own intelligence as we come to meet this new alien intelligence." 

"AI is completely changing the psychology and behaviour of work. Brain Fry is a proof point of that." 

Connect with Gabriella Rosen Kellerman on LinkedIn and her website, and check out her research and writing at Harvard Business Review. 

If you enjoyed this chat with Gabriella, I think you'd also love the first time she came on How I Work, where we talked all about thriving in times of uncertainty. You can find that episode here. 

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M 

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Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au 

Credits: Host: Amantha Imber Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler 

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