New research: The tech we love to hate is the tech we'd hate to lose

[#1]

👋 Hey Community!

Do you think you could give AI up at work?

Most people say yes. When Atlassian's Teamwork Lab surveyed over 1,000 knowledge workers, 57% said they could maintain their performance just fine without it. So we put it to the test.

We ran an AI Play/Pause experiment with 123 Atlassians — one workday using AI to its maximum, one workday without it entirely. On the no-AI day, 82% felt the urge to use it anyway. Nearly 1 in 4 reached for AI without thinking.

The deeper AI is woven into how a team works, the harder it is to give up. But reliance isn’t necessarily a problem. What can be a risk is reliance without judgment. And the Pause day actually helped people build that: 92% said they felt more confident about when not to use AI. As one participant put it: "It reminded me to trust my own expertise more."

📖 Read through the full research, and if you want to try it with your team, run this AI Play/Pause Day play.

How about you - has AI become so integrated into your workflows that you’d not be able to give it up? Has anyone ever tried a no-AI day? Tell us in the comments! 👇

[Brita Moorus]

That's an interesting approach. I think the AI Play day would be much easier to introduce than the AI Pause day.

For me, the more useful comparison might be to go almost "150% AI" for a day and intentionally trying to use AI wherever it could realistically help, then review what you actually built into your workflow on purpose. Which tasks genuinely became faster or better? Which ones felt forced? And which decisions still clearly benefited from human judgment?

The AI Pause day is probably the harder experiment, but maybe that's exactly why it reveals more about how dependent we've become on AI.

[Anna Brown]

Right on, @Brita Moorus , on the AI Pause days likely being the tougher sell. Reminds me "digital detox" days (no cells, social media) that lead to better mental health, according to some studies.

I like the supercharge AI Day concept!

[Stephen_Lugton]

I could probably go for the rest of the week without using AI (although if I happen to go to a garden centre and see a plant I like I might use AI on a picture of the plant to tell me how to place it and whether it will survive winter potted outside).

Basically everything I'm doing at work for the next 3 days is meetings that other people are running so no prep needed!  The only thing that might tempt me to use AI for is to review my emails and see if there's anything I have to respond to.

[Henry Wilson]

Yeah this part about trusting your own expertise stood out to me. I think a no AI day could be useful just to see how much we actually rely on it without even noticing.

[Tomislav Tobijas]

I mean, we lived without it before; I guess we could live without it again. But... if it were gone, I guess a lot of things would just be much 'slower' 🐌

Apart from that, some great ideas have been born while discussing stuff with AI, so we could lack some inspiration in that area as well.

But all in all, most of the things are replaceable - AI included 👀

[Anna Brown]

Hey there! FYI that @Molly Sands and I will be chatting about this research on a LinkedIn Live on Wed., Aug. 19th, at 11 am PT.

Join us and bring your questions!