A survey, commissioned and published by SolarWinds, reveals 71% of IT workers say artificial intelligence (AI) is making their jobs more demanding, leading to a worrying pattern of increased mental fatigue.
Back in February, Francesco Bonacci – the CEO of AI agent-building company Cua – posted an essay on X about the effect of AI on his mental fatigue. “I end each day exhausted – not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work,” he wrote. “It’s not burnout in the traditional sense. It’s something weirder – a kind of cognitive overload masked as productivity.”
In March 2026, the Harvard Business Review found a word for the workflow phenomenon: “AI brain-fry”. The study defined it as “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity”.
This brain-fry was made worse when employees had to directly monitor AI, and indicated a higher risk of quitting.
Between added responsibility, trust issues and oversight, one study shows how AI brain-fry impacts IT workers. More than a thousand IT professionals across the UK, US and India answered SolarWinds’ IT trends survey, The human side of autonomous IT.
While two-thirds of respondents claim AI led to less manual work, such as figuring out root causes faster, only 19% said AI reduced their cognitive load.
Instead, introducing AI into companies is creating more work for professionals.
As many as seven out of 10 IT staffers still have to check AI’s work, while four in 10 claim data privacy and security anxiety stops them from using tools effectively. Trust issues are prevalent in the field, with about half of those surveyed also concerned about a lack of “clear ownership or guardrails”.
Alongside these challenges, IT professionals are being tasked with keeping updated on AI progress and educating co-workers on the tools.
In Britain, only 17% of respondents hadn’t seen added friction or stress to their jobs because of AI, with two-fifths claiming their cognitive load increased.
Over the past six years, IT teams have had to spend more time strategising, analysing their system data and performance, preventing issues, managing tools and platforms, coordinating across teams and responding to unplanned issues. Even those who believe IT will become primarily or mostly automated in the next few years still expect challenges in accuracy, employee training and higher work expectations without increased resources.
The risks associated with AI are unevenly distributed within companies. Nearly half of C-suite executives say their IT teams are prepared for AI, but only 13% of technical contributors agree.
“While the wider workforce is embracing a growing number of AI tools, IT is left to manage and secure them, as well as extract value from data that often lacks context,” said Cullen Childress, chief product officer at SolarWinds.
He highlighted the “additional cognitive load” faced by IT workers. “Without proper planning, AI can introduce more risk through gaps in security and governance, while adding more fragmentation, reviews and sanity checks for teams that don’t have the capacity to absorb it,” said Childress.
