I made our whole team use AI tools and productivity went up 20% on paper. Morale went down and I almost didn't connect the two.

30-person services firm. Last year I went all-in on getting the team using AI tools, real rollout, training, expectations. The measurable output went up, maybe 20% more work shipped per head. On the dashboard, a clear win.

Over the same period, our engagement scores slipped, two good people left, and the office got quieter in a way I couldn't name. I spent a while treating these as unrelated. They weren't.

Here's what I think happened. The AI took over the parts of the work that were, it turns out, where people felt competent and where the small wins lived. The first draft, the research, the figuring-it-out. We automated the satisfying middle and left people with the two ends, the boring setup and the high-stakes final judgment, with the rewarding part in between hollowed out.

A junior writer used to feel the click of a draft coming together. Now she edits a machine's draft, which is faster and pays the same and feels like nothing. Multiply that across the team and you get more output and less of whatever makes people want to come in.

I'm not anti-AI and we're not rolling it back. But I got the framing wrong. I treated it purely as a productivity lever and ignored that I was also redesigning what people's days felt like, and "more output" and "work worth doing" turned out to be different things I'd assumed were the same.

What I'm trying now: using the time AI frees up to give people more of the work they actually find meaningful, not just more volume of the hollowed-out kind. Early days. For operators who rolled AI out to a team: did you see the morale cost, and did you find a way to get the productivity without gutting the satisfying part of the work?