AI brain fry is real. Here’s what leaders can do | Julie Bedard

0:02You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. It's only natural to have mixed feelings about the use of AI at work. There's often guilt, confusion, and anxiety that comes with it. AI expert Julie Bedard says this discomfort is normal. She also says that the sea change facing modern workplaces is inevitable. One issue is that many people are experiencing the transition in silos, working with their agents outside of their teams.

0:35Julie Bedard: This person-by-person job redesign, it can create individual productivity, but it doesn't scale. Let me give you an example. One well-seasoned manager I spoke to recently said, My team is producing 10x more output, 10x faster, yet my job feels 20x harder. In her talk, Julie recounts the research she has done on organizational structures. She found that despite increased productivity with AI, many managers report feeling less connection and cohesion. According to Julie, AI integrations should happen as a team. Our human workflow habits need just as much attention as the machines we're incorporating.

1:16How to make that happen is coming up right after a short break.

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4:03And now our TED Talk of the day.

4:06Julie Bedard: Does anyone else feel, no matter what you think about AI, it just feels a little bit wrong. You use it, you're afraid you're cutting corners. You don't use it. And you feel you're missing out. You're anxious, you get dismissed. You're optimistic, you get side-eye. Everything is just a little bit off. I've been advising executives and board leaders for the last several years on how to integrate AI into work, sitting in room after room, company after company, I can tell you it's not just you. This confusing feeling, it's a symptom of something bigger. AI is already redesigning work. Leadership teams, they're either frantic or frozen, spinning up too much change all at once in an uncoordinated way or letting all of us do individual DIY of our own job redesign.

5:07Julie Bedard: This person-by-person job redesign, it can create individual productivity, but it doesn't scale. Let me give you an example. One well-seasoned manager I spoke to recently said, my team is producing 10x more output, 10x faster, yet my job feels 20x harder. This manager felt she was more lonely, not more collaborative. The output sometimes was better, sometimes was worse. I talked to lots of managers. It wasn't just this one manager. Lots of people feel this way. My key message to you, AI will dramatically reshape more than half of jobs in the coming years. So this was never a question of whether we redesign work.

5:58Julie Bedard: This was always a question of how, how we lead through that redesign. I'm going to take you through three areas today where I feel we particularly need leadership in the redesign. I'll walk through some examples of how we might address this. Attention, accountability, apprenticeship. First, attention. My colleagues and I have been studying the experience of working with AI. One senior engineering manager said,

6:37Julie Bedard: This is BrainFry. Not burnout, something different. It results from the acute oversight of AI tools. It's mental fog, slower decision-making, more errors. Workers who experience BrainFry report 39 % more major errors. They're also 39 % more likely to intend to leave. Your most active AI users are at risk of walking out. No one set out to create BrainFry. It happened because we piled tool on top of tool on existing workflows without removing work or thinking about it as a team. The work we added was often cognitively more demanding. So what do we do about it? We need to redesign work and workflows as teams with outcomes in mind.

7:32Julie Bedard: We need to engage managers. I know managers already have a lot on their plate. But when you have managers answering questions about AI for employees, mental fatigue scores are 15 % lower. One company thought through this and started to redesign job descriptions, naming the more strategic work. They took out handoffs that were no longer needed. They created a broad upskilling plan. All of this was done in concert, not individually, one by one. Second, accountability. Companies are putting AI agents on org charts. They're giving them names, job titles. We were curious. We ran an experiment. Same document, same errors.

8:20Julie Bedard: Only difference. Who we said the drafter was. In one group, an AI tool. In one group, an AI employee. In the third group, an actual employee. For managers who were already familiar with the concept of of AI agents on org charts, personal accountability fell by nine percentage points when they reviewed work done by an AI employee. They found 18 % fewer errors. Escalations were up by 44%. Effectively, they scrutinized the work less, found fewer errors, and gave their job to someone else more frequently. One company in our study even named their AI. Let's just call it Bob. When mistakes happened, Bob made the mistake.

9:15Julie Bedard: This has a real organizational cost. Leaders, we didn't mean to rewire accountability. We thought putting AI agents on org charts would make it more familiar. That small choice impacted the amount of accountability that was felt by those reviewing work. To overcome this, agentic systems need a human overseer. We need a person with clear decision rights, an escalation path, and a career consequence if something goes wrong. We also need training for employees on how to review AI content. Do this before you name your AI. Third, apprenticeship. This is the one I think the most about. The entry-level work, the drafting, analysis, first cuts, research, increasingly that can be done by AI, at least somewhat.

10:15Julie Bedard: This work was how people learned. It was the at-bats that we all needed early in our career. Our research shows when juniors use AI for stretch assignments, they're able to produce good output. However, without expert support, they don't build the judgment underneath. It's output without learning. I get asked this question every week at least five times from C-level executives. How, how do I build talent in the age of AI? Companies that are tackling this are rewriting job descriptions to make them more rotational, more project-based. They're pairing juniors with senior expert talent. They're even leaning on the natural AI fluency of more junior talent and putting them forth in the organization as a forward-deployed AI enabler.

11:12Julie Bedard: Even more importantly, they're taking the time to rewrite manager and leadership competencies. They're including coaching, upskilling on AI, rewiring work as a team. perhaps this is our opportunity to invest in the development-focused managers we've always said we wanted. Attention, accountability, apprenticeship. These are three areas where the work redesign is happening to us instead of being led by us if we're not careful. The core work of a leader right now is to optimize this work with good outcomes in mind and the best of human and machine intelligence. Companies that are getting the most from AI, they're already doing this.

12:00Julie Bedard: They're 12 times more likely to have executives and leadership teams engaged with AI. They're four times more likely to dedicate time to and structure AI learning. They're two and a half times more likely to reshape workflows. Those conflicting feelings I mentioned at the beginning, the shame, exposure, fear of missing out, It doesn't have to feel that way. It's what it feels like to be inside of this work transition. We need leaders to name what's changing. We need leaders to creatively problem solve these types of challenges, to be thinking of them very actively. And the question of AI, this conversation about AI that we've been having over the last several years, which has been predominantly about the technology.

12:51Julie Bedard: It can finally become what we always knew it was going to be, a conversation about the humans, the change, and leadership. Thank you.

13:07That was Julie Bedard at TED at BCG in 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivam. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet.

13:48Thanks for listening.

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14:37Julie Bedard: And visit www.ashbhq.com slash TED.

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