# This is what AI is actually doing to your brain, with Gabriella Rosen Kellerman Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-i-work-960132/this-is-what-ai-is-actually-doing-to-your-brain-with-gabriella-rosen-kellerman Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-i-work-960132/this-is-what-ai-is-actually-doing-to-your-brain-with-gabriella-rosen-kellerman.md Podcast: [How I Work](https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-i-work-960132) Published: 2026-04-22T20:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://omny.fm/shows/how-i-work/hw-gabriella-v2 Audio file: https://mgln.ai/e/187/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/fa326977-3de5-4283-9b8b-af3500c58607/190bd54e-82e6-43fb-8f6a-af46001792de/b076e38e-a1db-494b-b0a5-b4330024c61f/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=71f0c47d-eac4-4e42-b713-af46001792ec Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/how-i-work-960132/episodes/this-is-what-ai-is-actually-doing-to-your-brain-with-gabriella-rosen-kellerman Duration seconds: 2123 ## Resource 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… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/how-i-work-960132/episodes/this-is-what-ai-is-actually-doing-to-your-brain-with-gabriella-rosen-kellerman/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-i-work-960132/this-is-what-ai-is-actually-doing-to-your-brain-with-gabriella-rosen-kellerman.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.