Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI
Ashley Wallace returned to her job after six months of maternity leave and met a new coworker: Claude.
Before her leave, Wallace used ChatGPT to answer questions and some basic automations for notetaking or recruiting in her role as head of talent at the AI language-learning app Praktika. "I came back thinking, oh, I'll ease myself in," she says. "It definitely isn't the case in the landscape that I came back to." During her absence, the company had ushered in Claude Cowork — and Wallace didn't even know where to find the new system everyone was talking about on her computer.
Add to her new reality that AI has rocked the job hunt process. Instead of the typical few hundred people applying for open roles at the startup, Wallace returned to find more than 1,000 vying for some jobs. Candidates sometimes come to interviews unable to answer a single question after she suspects they padded their applications with AI, forcing Wallace to come up with new ways to weed out unqualified applicants earlier. In the few months that she had been away with her baby, AI had made the job she knew foreign to her.
"Ever seen someone give someone a mobile phone that's never had a mobile phone before?" Wallace says. "That's like how I felt when I came back."
A leave of absence from work often results in a frenzied email inbox and missed office gossip, but, as companies unleash AI into every corner of their business, some people now return to a job they don't recognize. There are new enterprise systems, workflows, and AI sprint experiments that rise and fall — all under the shadow of the threat that AI will end up taking your job anyway.
In a world of constant AI updates, going out of the office, even for a few weeks, can feel like moving toward obsolescence.
Nearly half of workers say their companies have adopted AI, up from 38% last fall, according to a Gallup poll published in July. Forty percent of workers at large companies said in a McKinsey survey this spring that their firms are scaling their use of agents, up from 27% last year. PwC found a massive spike in workers saying they have used AI: 64% this year, growing 10% year-over-year. At the same time, America's workforce has the widest access to paid leave it's ever known, thanks to a spike in state-mandated family leave over the last two decades and changes to company policies to extend family leave or add paid sabbaticals. As the pace of change in white-collar work accelerates at world-historic rates, leaves are lengthening — leaving many of those who return from them acclimating to drastically reshaped roles.
Max Cherry left his job in public relations three years ago to travel. He met his wife and then went on the road with her to support her professional tennis career. When he took a new public relations gig this summer, he found that AI had become part of the daily workflow, rather than something workers used sporadically three years ago — and often in secret. Research and media lists that used to take hours to compile could come together quickly, and the speed of brainstorming ideas had accelerated alongside AI. Catching up required him to shake old habits.
"I have to train myself like, 'hey, it's OK to put this into the AI agent,'" Cherry says, noting he now uses AI to sort through dense text and numbers, while spending energy on the parts of the job that remain deeply human, like relationship-building and judgement.
Employment gaps, which are more likely to appear on women's résumés as they care for children or family, have long sparked existential worries. They can hobble one's chances of getting interviews, landing a well-paid job, and maintaining their seniority. AI has warped roles so quickly and drastically that even early adopters can feel left behind, and might scramble to get back to their desks.
Jess Clark pivoted her business, which centered on courses about making courses, to teaching women how to use ChatGPT in early 2023. When she had her third baby last year, Clark signed off for about three weeks. During a precious nap window, she opened her phone and saw creators and news outlets declaring a new era: ChatGPT out, Claude in.
"I was in a full spiral for about a week," Clark says, feeling like she had missed the chance to future-proof her business in just those three weeks away. She immediately started sprinting to keep pace, she tells me, and taught herself how to code with Claude, and reoriented her courses to focus on Claude as well. Clark says she still feels like she's trying to catch up to every AI rollout. AI updates may outpace her, but she can focus on finding the next issue that emerges.
"I can't foresee what's going to happen in the future," Clark says. But with each new AI update, "you just jump on, and you give it a go, and you learn."
The changes may also swallow the parts of work that people love. Tina, whose last name has been omitted to protect her job, returned from maternity leave this spring and immediately noticed that the design work her colleagues churned out looked "overly glossy" and contained odd patterns. It was the telltale sign of AI-generated illustrations, something the company had not relied on previously.
Now, Tina says bosses have changed policies to encourage or require AI use to accelerate the design process. They take feedback from ChatGPT on past designs, and then either prompt AI or run their sketches through an AI design tool to arrive at a rendering. She estimates it takes as long or longer than when she ideated and illustrated on her own, because the AI output often needs extensive tweaking. The new mandates also make Tina anxious that the company could decide to replace designers, even if the results are lower quality. "You spend your whole life and career learning this skill," she says. "Just in a couple of months, a couple of weeks, that skill is rendered essentially not useful anymore."
There also come times when workers feel they need to step off the ever-turning AI treadmill. Chenda Ngak, head of communications at Tumblr and WordPress.com's parent company Automattic, took a paid, three-month sabbatical this summer to travel through Southeast Asia. Ngak says the rapid pace of AI development has given tech workers whiplash. "Every day there's something new, and so we've been operating in this pace for several years now, and I was just like, 'wow, I think I may be approaching a burnout,'" she says.
She deleted the Slack and email apps from her phone and left her computer behind. She didn't touch AI for three months, and gave up her phone entirely for six days to attend a digital detox at a Cambodian yoga retreat. Instead of GCal dictating her days, the sound of a gong ruled her activities: sunrise yoga, breathwork, and device-free communing with strangers.
The six unmoored days felt long, Ngak tells me, but the digital detox worked like a reset button. Speaking to me on just her second day back at her desk, she plans to maintain habits from her leave, such as a 15-minute daily yoga practice and greater patience in her conversations. Ngak says she's already encountering updates to the company's tools, including new AI integrations. But after intentionally moving away from constant connection and AI for those three months, Ngak feels more prepared to keep pace with an evolving workplace.
As AI continues to evolve, workers have an increasingly hard time keeping up with every update. The future of work-life balance will mean letting go when you need to — and returning from leave ready for a crash course in AI's newest era.