We’re in the era of AI this, AI that…and now we’re talking about AI again, I know! I hope you’re not getting fatigued on this yet, but hear me out: how much have you been using AI day-to-day lately? I ask because I know I have been using it more than I did at this time last year. 

AI has always been framed as the ultimate partner (coworker, even) that’s here to automate the boring stuff and hand us a bit of our time back. After all, fewer manual tasks means faster builds and less grunt work.

So why does it feel like admins are busier than ever?

A recent thread on r/Salesforce was started by asking the community this exact question, and the responses show that this seems to be broader than just one admin having a bad week. One commenter summed up the mood: “I’m not like a smart guy or anything. My coworkers just seem so resistant to doing anything themselves.” Several others chimed in with versions of the same story, and from there we can see a pattern emerge. 

But Isn’t AI Supposed to Speed Things Up?

Yes, that’s the simple goal. However, it’s more complex than just “AI makes your life easier”.

Tools like AI and Agentforce are meant to take work off your plate. Hours spent building flows, minutes summarizing cases, and drafting documentation can now be done with a few prompts and clicks. In theory, it’s less manual labor, and for some, that’s genuinely happening. 

Our very own Tim Combridge lives and breathes AI, and in his free time, he recently built a teleprompter app he otherwise wouldn’t have had the time to pull off. On a smaller and more personal scale, even I, with all my occasional complaints about AI, will admit I lean on it for things like meal plans and exercise routines – stuff that used to eat up my evening if I researched it myself. 

One developer on the thread described using AI to trace a process spanning multiple Apex classes and over a thousand lines of code. Normally, that takes hours and hours of manual digging, but it can now be done in a fraction of the time.

Not everyone’s experience has been all positive, though. It always starts with modest expectations, then eventually the math doesn’t add up the way they expected. This is true for many admins, as evidenced by comments on the thread. As one put it, making AI handle more of your work doesn’t mean less work overall, because the business around you grows and changes constantly. Sure, you finish tasks faster, but the volume and scope of what lands on your desk just keep growing to match.

You’re Not Imagining It

Recent Harvard Business Review research found that AI tools are intensifying knowledge work rather than reducing it, creating new task categories, raising managerial expectations, and ultimately driving burnout. The core idea is often called the productivity paradox, which highlights how advanced technology can sometimes fail to translate into better economic or labor output. When a tool like AI makes a task faster, that saved time rarely makes it back to the worker.

Other reporting supports this with numbers. The research found that since AI adoption, time spent emailing has doubled, and focused work sessions have dropped by 9%. If this pattern shows that a task that used to take six hours can now take 40 minutes, why isn’t anyone getting sent home early?

The Evolution of “Do More With Less”

Quick rewind to 2022, because this didn’t start with AI. When inflation hit, and the market stopped rewarding growth at all costs, profitability suddenly became the only thing that mattered. Tech companies responded the way they always do: layoffs. This leads to fewer people, but it does not mean the amount of work lessens. The same amount of work remains, and this is where the “do more with less” mentality began.

AI arrived on top of that, and instead of easing the pressure, it folded right in and amplified it. Just like running on a treadmill: AI speeds things up, leadership reads that as “we can run this with fewer people”, headcount shrinks, and the people left have to run faster just to stay in the same spot. The treadmill doesn’t slow down, and whoever’s still on it has to adjust to the speed.

One commenter on the thread put it sharply: if everyone’s so much more efficient now thanks to AI, why hasn’t that meant four-day work weeks, more vacation, or higher pay? It’s a fair question to be honest, and it is a clear picture of how the productivity paradox plays out in a Salesforce org.

The Classic Productivity Paradox in Salesforce

A few comments on the thread captured how this translates perfectly into one’s work in Salesforce. One admin described knocking out a flow in half the usual time after adopting AI for config work, only for their manager to immediately load three more tickets onto their plate. Another put it more bluntly: no productivity tool in history has ever resulted in people working less – it just resets what “enough” means.

There’s also the issue of visibility. One commenter’s advice was to keep your AI use quiet, because if coworkers realize you have more capacity, they’ll offload their own work onto you instead of learning it themselves. Another one described the same thing, but this time from the other side: teammates are now using AI to figure out how to automate parts of their jobs, which is causing more issues and generating more tickets instead.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s the admin or the user side that uses AI, the takeaway is the same: AI fluency doesn’t just change how much you can do, it changes how much people assume you can absorb. That assumption creeps in fast and becomes a bigger factor than one would expect.

Protect Your Capacity (On Purpose)

The easiest way to fix this isn’t learning more AI, and certainly not pivoting back to manual everything. This cycle, where efficiency gets absorbed into higher expectations, isn’t new. It’s been happening for years, and AI just made that cycle move faster. The solution is more of a boundaries fix. 

The thread converged on the same advice from a few angles: don’t quietly take on extra work just because AI makes it possible. Push back where you can, and where you can’t, document the pattern and raise it with your manager. One commenter framed this as having the capacity conversation before you get burnt out.

In practice, it would also be useful to track how much time AI is actually saving you on specific task types. It’s easier to prove a point when you’ve got real data. These numbers help the conversation when it actually happens, and even having these personally could help you be deliberate about what you absorb versus refuse or redirect. The freed-up time can then be something you get to decide how to allocate instead of getting it filled automatically with overflow work based on the simple feeling that “AI helped me work faster on this”. 

Final Thoughts

Going back to the thread’s original question: Is AI making admins busier? 

Not on purpose, but yes, often. The system was already squeezing admins before AI showed up, and right now it’s only amplifying that squeeze instead of relieving it. The productivity gains, on the other hand, are real. Perhaps it might make more sense to question who’s banking those gains, because most admins don’t feel like it’s them.

If this resonates, you’re not imagining it! The flex now perhaps isn’t just “doing more” with AI. It’s also knowing when to say “this is enough” and actually meaning it.

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