For the past six months, I've been asking every leader I know the same question. Has artificial intelligence saved you time?
The answer is always an immediate yes.
Then I reframe it. Do you find yourself working fewer hours?
The answer is always no.
The gap between those two answers is one of the most interesting things happening in leadership right now, and almost nobody is naming it out loud.
AI is saving us time. None of us are getting any of it back.
What AI has actually done is collapse the time required for certain tasks. A report that took three hours takes twenty minutes. An email draft that needed a focused half hour shows up in ninety seconds. Research that used to fill an afternoon happens before my coffee gets cold. But I would argue that's not even the biggest benefit. The bigger benefit is that AI lets me pursue excellence in places I never had the bandwidth to pursue it before. I can think more carefully. I can iterate more times. I can ask better questions and chase down sharper answers.
The catch is that none of that translates into shorter days. For most leaders I know, including me, the time we "saved" got reinvested into more tasks, more excellence, more pursuit. The friction came down. Our ambition didn't.
The friction came down. Our ambition didn't.
There's a name for what's happening here. Parkinson's Law. A British historian named Cyril Northcote Parkinson coined it in 1955 in an essay in The Economist, and the line is famous for a reason. Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Give yourself a week to write something that needs two hours and it will take a week. Give yourself an afternoon and you'll get it done.
I've been making a version of this point for years with a simpler image. The more kitchen cabinets you have, the more you fill them. The space creates the demand. It's the same with closet space, garage space, calendar space, and now time itself. When we "save" time with AI, we don't actually get the time back. We just hand it to more work. The cabinet got bigger. We filled it.
The cabinet got bigger. We filled it.
We've seen this pattern of adaptation before. When dial-up internet first arrived, we couldn't believe what we had. The library was suddenly in our living room. Then cable came along. A couple of months of cable, you go back to dial-up at someone's house, and it feels unbearable. The miracle became the floor. AI is doing the exact same thing to us right now. Something that took ten hours now takes one minute. A few months in, you find yourself annoyed it isn't 30 seconds. You hit a spinning wheel and wonder what on earth is taking so long. The first time you got an instant answer, you were amazed. Now you go back forty-five times trying to get the same answer and feel frustrated that the tool doesn't read your mind.
Our adaptation curve is brutal. And it should make us ask a harder question about how we're using this.
The miracle became the floor.
I keep coming back to Cain and Abel. Cain was a farmer who, I believe, didn't make time for God. Abel was a shepherd, and the rhythm of his work let him be present. Their offerings were different because their lives were different. I don't think AI is morally neutral here. I think it's offering us a real chance to change the kind of work we do, so we can spend more of our hours on the things that are most human. Thinking. Praying. Loving the people in front of us. Right now we're a long way from that being the norm, but the door is open in a way it wasn't open before.
AI is offering us a real chance to change the kind of work we do, so we can spend more of our hours on the things that are most human.
There's a part of this that lands differently for leaders who are neurodivergent.
I've always been someone who finds flow state through specific doors. Audiobooks. Conversations with another leader. Long runs. Those still work for me. But AI has become one of the fastest paths to flow I've ever found. More on demand, more intense, more reliable. It hits the dopamine of productivity in a way I genuinely enjoy. If you're wired similarly, you've probably already noticed this. The risk, of course, is that flow without intention is just another form of running fast in the wrong direction. Or just another bigger cabinet.
Flow without intention is just another form of running fast in the wrong direction.
I told a team member recently that I'm grateful I get to be alive during this stretch of time. I've often said I wish I was born in the sixties. I love the idea of an era when people wore suits to work, when meetings were meetings, when the pace had some grace to it. But this decade, this exact decade we're in, is one I wouldn't trade. AI is the most remarkable invention of my lifetime. I think it has real power to make us more human, not less.
AI is the most remarkable invention of my lifetime. I think it has real power to make us more human, not less.
Here's the test I keep coming back to.
If the tool doesn't free me up to spend more time on what actually matters, or at least help me find ways to spend more time on what actually matters, then I either have the wrong tool or I'm using it the wrong way. The output isn't the measure. The life on the other side of the output is the measure.
The output isn't the measure. The life on the other side of the output is the measure.
For me, what matters is serving God by serving others. Being present with my family. Building Beratung and TeachPassion in a way that honors both. Thinking long thoughts about hard problems. Showing up for the people I lead. If AI helps me protect more time for those things, it's doing its job. If it just refills my calendar with more of the same, I'm the one who failed the assignment.
So I'd ask you the same thing I've been asking everyone else. AI is saving you time. Good. Now what are you doing with it?
Live Intentional.
Greg Furer, CFP®