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Harvard Business Review recently put a name to something many of us have been feeling: “AI brain fry.” At first, it felt like one of those terms that sounds dramatic, but when you unpack how work has evolved, it starts to feel uncomfortably accurate.
Then I saw the chart. Marketing came out on top.
According to the study, marketing professionals reported the highest levels of AI-related mental fatigue, higher than HR, operations, engineering, finance and IT. And the more I thought about it...the less surprising it felt.
Because if you work in marketing today, your brain is rarely in one place.
The “50 tabs open” problem
Marketing has always been a bit chaotic. That’s part of the job.
However, there’s a kind of constant mental drift that defines the role now.
You’re not just working on one thing, you’re operating across layers. Within the same hour, you might be:
- prompting a tool for copy
- reviewing and refining outputs
- switching to research
- analyzing new trends
- jumping into campaign strategy
- editing tone or structure
- going back to editing again
I wouldn’t define this simply as “multitasking” in the traditional sense anymore. It’s continuous context switching, micro adjustments at a level we haven’t really experienced before. And over time, that adds up.
AI Didn’t Reduce Workload, It Redistributed It
AI has undeniably made marketing faster. Tasks that once took hours now take minutes. Production is more scalable. Execution is more efficient.
But what’s less visible is what AI has added in return.
AI takes away the doing, but adds a layer of overseeing.
Instead of writing from scratch, you’re now:
- evaluating outputs
- making judgment calls
- deciding what’s “good enough”
- stitching together fragments from different tools
The HBR research highlights this clearly—work that involves monitoring AI outputs actually requires more mental effort than work that doesn’t.
It’s a different kind of load. Sounds light on paper, but cognitively, it’s heavier and more demanding.
When More Tools Start Working Against You
There’s also an unspoken pressure to use more tools.
Not just one AI platform, but several—each promising incremental gains in speed or quality. And while that can work in theory, the reality is messier.
The catch is that productivity doesn’t scale linearly with tools.
At some point, it dips.
The HBR research found that productivity increases when you go from one to two tools... but starts to decline after too many are in play.
And yet, most of us are operating well beyond that threshold because the pressure isn’t just to use AI—it’s to use it well, often and everywhere.
And as a founder running a marketing consultancy, I see this play out daily. Different clients prefer different tools. Teams develop their own stacks. And there’s always something “better” around the corner.
The result isn’t just better output, it’s fragmented attention.
Why Marketing Feels it Most
Marketing has always sat at the intersection of multiple disciplines—strategy, creativity, data, storytelling, execution. And now, AI is embedded in every one of those layers.
We’re switching between:
- analytical thinking (performance, metrics)
- creative thinking (ideas, narratives)
- editorial judgment (tone, nuance)
…often within the same hour.
It’s no wonder our brains feel like they’re constantly buffering.
So What Do We Do With This?
If you’ve made it this far, please note this is not an anti-AI take.
AI is genuinely transformative. It’s made things faster, more accessible, more scalable.
But it’s also introduced a new kind of cognitive load that we’re still learning how to manage.
I truly feel the answer isn’t more tools. It should be:
- fewer tools, used more intentionally
- clearer workflows
- more time spent thinking before prompting
- less unnecessary switching between contexts
Small changes, but they compound.
Personally, there are three main tools I keep coming back to—ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
I’ve tried many more, but at some point, simplifying the stack becomes less about efficiency and more about protecting how you think.
A Shift We’re Only Just Beginning to Understand
AI is one of the most powerful shifts we’ve seen in how marketing gets done.
It has unlocked speed, scale and entirely new ways of working. But it’s also reshaping something more fundamental—how we think while we work.
And I say this not as an observer, but as someone in it every day.
Running a marketing consultancy today means constantly navigating this balance. Between speed and clarity. Between using what’s available and not overwhelming the process. Between doing more and actually thinking better.
Some days, AI feels like an unfair advantage. Other days, it feels like noise.
And I don’t think we’ve quite figured out where that line sits yet.
Because at the end of the day, marketing isn’t just output.
➜ It’s judgment.
➜ It’s taste.
➜ It’s context.
➜ It’s knowing what to say and what not to say.
Those are still very human things.
AI can support that. It can accelerate parts of it, but it can’t replace the thinking behind it.
If anything, it makes that thinking more important.
So maybe the real shift isn’t about how much AI we use. It’s about how we protect the way we think while using it. These tools will keep evolving, but clarity, original thought and good judgment—that still comes from us.
And that’s the part worth holding onto.
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