These Canadian companies are using AI to reduce stress and burnout | Canada Voices

When Evelynn Ratcliffe and her team use artificial intelligence in the workplace, it’s less about saving time here and there, and more about relieving the mental load in a high-pressure job.

Ms. Ratcliffe, a partner with custom home building and renovation company Alair Homes in Toronto, oversees 12 employees who use AI in their daily jobs. Amid concerns of AI taking people’s jobs, she’s found the tools to be useful support for her team, not their replacements.

“[AI] probably does replace some jobs, but I think it also creates a whole bunch of other ones and it also improves the quality and productivity of the jobs that are being done,” she says.

Ms. Ratcliffe’s team uses Microsoft Copilot, which “allows for a protection of data” that some other programs do not, for time-consuming daily tasks such as writing emails, prioritizing to-do lists, invoice management, scheduling and transcribing and summarizing meeting minutes.

“When we’re onsite, we’re meeting with homeowners, emotions are high. Money is almost always on the line and if not, schedules are on the line,” she says. “So, we want to make sure that we’re not missing anything important.

“It’s really nice to have a tool that’s capturing all of the additional details and saying, ‘Hey you have a follow-up item here.’”

While the adoption of AI has certainly helped improve productivity at Alair Homes, Ms. Ratcliffe says one of the major benefits has been decreased stress and mental load.

“I think the biggest thing for me is my ‘invisible list’ went away,” she says. “Those lower-priority tasks. It was like all the stuff that you put under your stairs knowing you’ll deal with it one day. But every single time you walk down the stairs, you can feel it in boxes… I’m getting to those tasks now.”

Construction and renovation are far from the only industries in Canada using AI to reduce employee stress.

Sneha Sandil, a restaurant manager at the Indian restaurant chain Sula in Vancouver, says her boss custom-built an AI-powered tool to reduce administrative burden on workers. The tool does everything from make their schedule, communicate with customers, calculate tip outs, create updated menus and help with inventory and ordering by tracking how much of a particular dish has been sold.

“I used to spend a lot of time making the schedule,” Ms. Sandil says. “And I wouldn’t be able to focus on other things like marketing or growing the business.” Now, she can complete these tasks, feels less burnt out and has more time for herself outside of work.

Using AI for the type of administrative work that Ratcliffe and Sandil do aligns with a growing body of research that shows “AI creates the greatest value when it augments people rather than replaces them,” says Anita Zielina, the chief executive officer and founder of Better Leaders Lab, who has worked with hundreds of senior leaders and news organizations around the world on AI adoption.

“In many organizations, burnout is driven less by the core job itself than by administrative overload, endless context switching and the constant feeling of never catching up,” she says. “[AI] can shorten the time spent on low-value work and give employees more uninterrupted time for deep work, which is often where people experience the greatest sense of purpose and satisfaction.”

Ms. Ratcliffe adds that the time savings associated with reducing workload doesn’t necessarily have to mean more time for more work.

“Every single time we, as society, have found a faster, better way to do something, we don’t fill that with rest and recharge. We fill that gap with more productivity,” Ms. Ratcliffe says. “You can say, ‘I want to be able to take Fridays off because I want to be able to spend a little bit more time up north or with family or just getting some extra vitamin D.’”

For organizations hoping to achieve those kinds of benefits, Ms. Zielina says implementation matters as much as the technology itself. First: get employee input. “Ask employees which parts of their jobs feel repetitive, frustrating or unnecessarily time consuming,” she says.

Be transparent about your goals. “If employees believe AI is primarily about reducing headcount, trust will erode quickly,” she adds.

Additionally, businesses can take this opportunity to redefine what successful AI implementation looks like.

“The organizations that will benefit most from AI are not the ones that automate the fastest,” Ms. Zielina says. “They are the ones that use AI to build healthier, more creative and more resilient workplaces.”