Everyone said AI would make us work less. They were wrong.

I'm working more than ever. And I'm not alone.

Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: AI doesn't reduce the amount of work. It reduces the friction of work. And when work has no friction, you do more of it.

The Productivity Paradox

Six months ago, writing a legal memo took me 3 hours. Research, drafting, citations, editing. It sucked, but it was finite. I'd finish and be done.

Now? With AI, that same memo takes 20 minutes. But instead of working 2 hours and 40 minutes less, I write four more memos. Because I can.

The work isn't easier—it's frictionless. And frictionless work is addictive.

You know the feeling. You're in a conversation, someone asks a question, and instead of saying "I'll get back to you," you pull up Claude and answer it immediately. Then someone asks for a report. You generate it in 90 seconds. Then someone wants a pitch deck. You spin it up before the call ends.

It feels like productivity. It's not. It's capacity expansion.

Why This Matters for Founders

Most founders think: "If AI makes me 10x faster, I'll work 1/10th the hours."

Doesn't happen. You work the same hours and do 10x the work. Because AI creates opportunity, not leisure.

Here's what actually happens:

  • You used to hire a designer for landing pages. Now you generate them yourself.
  • You used to outsource blog posts. Now you write them in-house.
  • You used to delay feature builds. Now you ship them same-day.

Each individual task gets faster. But the number of tasks explodes.

Your Slack goes from 20 messages a day to 200, because everyone knows you can respond instantly. Your product roadmap goes from quarterly releases to weekly. Your sales pipeline goes from "email me later" to "let's draft a proposal right now."

AI doesn't give you free time. It gives you infinite surface area.

The Wealth Gap Is a Compute Gap

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the people who realize this fastest will win.

Because while everyone else is celebrating "I finished early today!", the founders using AI to do MORE work are building moats.

  • While you write one blog post a week, they write one per day
  • While you close one customer a month, they close five
  • While you ship one feature a quarter, they ship ten

The gap isn't talent anymore. It's volume. And volume is now a function of how effectively you use AI.

We're entering an era where output is no longer constrained by time or skill. It's constrained by attention.

The question isn't "Can you do this?" It's "Are you paying attention to this?"

And attention is finite.

The Trap

Here's where it gets dangerous.

If you're not careful, AI becomes a treadmill. You're running faster and faster, accomplishing more and more, but you're not actually moving forward. You're just keeping pace.

Because your competitors have AI too. And if everyone's output goes 10x, the baseline goes 10x. You're back to square one, just exhausted.

The founders who win aren't the ones who use AI to work more. They're the ones who use AI to work different.

What "Different" Looks Like

  • Leverage, not volume: Use AI to create assets that scale (automated sales, content pipelines, self-serve tools) instead of just doing more one-off work
  • Judgment, not execution: Spend your time DECIDING what to build, not building it yourself
  • Coordination, not solo work: Use AI to empower your team, not replace them (give your employees AI superpowers instead of hoarding the leverage yourself)

The founders who treat AI like a way to "work less" will get left behind. The founders who treat it like a way to "do more busywork" will burn out.

The winners? They'll treat AI as a way to change the game entirely.

The Bottom Line

AI doesn't make you work less. It makes work frictionless.

And frictionless work is infinite work.

The question isn't whether you'll use AI. It's whether you'll let it control your time, or whether you'll use it to control your leverage.

Choose wisely.