Most AI adoption creates workload creep — tasks get easier, so more gets done, until the cognitive load exceeds what the productivity gains justified. We help organizations build the North Star, organizational imagination, and boundary practices that make AI regenerative rather than extractive.
UC Berkeley researchers named it workload creep: AI makes tasks easier, so workers do more. Expectations rise to match new capacity. Workers feel they should accomplish more because AI makes it feel possible. Result: more work done, but higher cognitive load and burnout. 83% of workers are experiencing burnout (DHR Global, 2024). 77% say AI decreased productivity and increased workload (Upwork, 2024).
What's missing from traditional AI adoption: no conversation about why (beyond "productivity"), no organizational imagination about what becomes possible, no North Star guiding when to use and when to stop, no worker voice in how AI changes work, no regenerative vs. extractive framing.
We don't do AI implementation. We do accompaniment through AI transformation — frontline-first, co-discovery, stay-through-the-messy-middle.
A values-based framework that answers: Why are we using AI — beyond productivity? What outcomes do we want? What becomes possible with the capacity it creates? What won't we do? How do we measure regenerative vs. extractive impact? The North Star guides tool selection and use. It comes before choosing which AI products to buy — not after.
The practice of envisioning what becomes possible when AI frees capacity. Instead of "do more faster," asking: What deep work has never had time? What quality was sacrificed for speed? What meaningful work has been pushed aside? Without this practice, AI simply intensifies existing patterns — more of what was already burning people out.
Extractive metrics: productivity gains, adoption rates, time saved per task, ROI. Regenerative metrics: energy levels, workload creep monitoring, decision quality, meaningful work percentage, worker agency, boundary maintenance, innovation capacity. These are measurements of fundamentally different goals.
The starting point is a diagnostic conversation about where AI is already affecting your organization — and where the workload creep is beginning.
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