Innovation or exhaustion? The human cost of tech’s AI reset
As companies demand founder-level ownership and round-the-clock availability, AI is raising productivity, and the risk of burnout.
A week after Wix brought all employees back to the office, it announced a new type of super-engineer (xEngineer). This engineer, with the help of AI, is expected to take full ownership of a product from idea to production. The announcement is both the opening shot and the closing chord in a discussion that began about a year ago around “Founder Mode” - a management and work approach that emphasizes ownership and responsibility for all aspects of a product, regardless of role definitions or hierarchy, with the aim of moving fast and encouraging innovation and creativity.
The return to offices on the one hand and the change in requirements on the other mark a shift in perception in high-tech, one that is clearly felt by employees, whose numbers are decreasing while their responsibilities are increasing.
The discussion around “Founder Mode” began after a series of statements from founders and a seminal article by Paul Graham, co-founder of the Y Combinator accelerator, written in September 2024 following remarks by Brian Chesky, founder and CEO of Airbnb. Graham described a management approach in which founders return to deep involvement in details, sometimes to the point of micromanagement, shortening bureaucratic processes and leading the organization like a startup in its early stages even when the company is already large and established. But the discussion quickly pivoted and became an expectation that employees should assume more responsibility and ownership, develop a lateral vision, and deliver greater productivity with fewer people. Some of these expectations also translated into demands for physical presence in offices and around-the-clock availability, because that is what it is like when you found a startup: you are on a roller coaster, responsible for everything and working non-stop. Now there are also AI agents that can help streamline everything, so the message is: come to the office, have a coffee, and manage these agents.
It is nothing new that high-tech workers are expected to work hard and deliver. But the demands have changed. Artificial intelligence has truly transformed job definitions, and what was previously perceived as an unreasonable burden for one person has become the expected standard. Moreover, if it seemed after the pandemic that the labor market had changed forever, that flexibility and working from home did not harm productivity and that trust was the foundation, today it appears that parts of high-tech have a short memory. The return to offices, the demand for around-the-clock availability, and the blurring of roles are presented as adaptations to the AI era. If more can be done with new tools, then more can also be demanded, with barely a word about burnout, employee experience, or balance.
“In a startup, the role of the first people has always been critical, with a much higher level of responsibility than in large companies,” says Aviv Yonas, VP HR at Team8. “What has changed now is that startups being established today are smaller and leaner, they recruit fewer people but are expected to deliver products, customers, and an excellent technological platform very quickly. Therefore, every person who joins the company needs to master many more areas. That employee is required to understand frontend, data, infrastructure, product, and sometimes also be in contact with customers. In practice, they manage an array of tools and AI agents and are required to take full ownership of the product. This has always been part of the DNA of startups, but in the last two years the requirement has become significantly more acute,” she says.
According to her, what characterized early employees at startups is expanding and permeating large, established companies with thousands of employees. “Wix’s example with the xEngineer illustrates this well: one engineer is expected to possess a combination of several skills, what is required today is for employees to be a ‘jack of all trades,’ to know everything about everything, and this is made possible by technology.”
The pressure on technology companies to remain relevant and at the cutting edge is clear and understandable. So is the demand that employees be responsible and use technological tools to drive innovation and high productivity. But the question that arises from the discussion around Founder Mode is whether the demand to delve deeply, take ownership, and remain innovative necessarily also requires physical presence in the office and availability around the clock. While companies present the return to the office as a natural part of work and as a necessary tool in a world constantly changing thanks to AI, the connection between the two is not obvious. It is possible to demand responsibility and productivity without physical presence, and it is possible to delve deeply without working around the clock. On the contrary, AI tools make this possible today more than ever before.
“There is no clear trend in our startups toward working more from home or more from the office. Nor is it specifically about working long hours. People are measured by productivity, not hours. Today, many tasks that previously required much more time or many more people can be done with AI. Therefore, measurement is based on productivity, and we expect very high productivity,” she says.
The question is not where the work is done from, but how it is managed, how success is measured, and how companies can stay in the mad technological race without eroding the ‘human resource.’ Dr. Noam Koriat, an adjunct lecturer at the School of Management and Economics at Bar-Ilan University, who has researched the impact of working from home on creativity and innovation, argues that full physical presence in offices does not improve productivity, and, more importantly, does not lead to more innovation or creativity either.
The starting point is that employees want to work from home because it gives them flexibility, saves time in traffic, and allows them to work even in complex situations, such as caring for a family member. Employers, on the other hand, want employees to be physically in the office as much as possible because they believe it encourages more intensive work, reduces bureaucracy, and creates direct dialogue, hallway conversations where innovation supposedly occurs. What Koriat found is that remote work actually streamlines work, especially management.
“One of the things that happened as a result of remote work during the coronavirus pandemic is that everything became more organized, including work. In organizations, when work is done remotely, I have to plan meetings, make sure everyone is available, share documents, and manage the workflow. Everything has become much more structured, and so has the quality of management processes. Managers need to know how to monitor employees who are not in the office, understand what they are doing, prepare more precise work plans, and synchronize tasks. Therefore, the quality of management has improved with remote work,” he says.
But even if management quality has improved, it is still unclear how remote work affects innovation or creativity. “Once we improve management, which is a component of a measure called Teamwork Quality, we also improve coordination within the team, each employee’s understanding of what others are doing, and the sharing of knowledge between them,” he says. “Collaboration and knowledge sharing are the foundation of creativity.”
Creativity, he explains, is a process in which new ideas are generated through iterative thinking about a problem and adapting new solutions to it. High-level creativity requires collaboration between people, sharing knowledge, because when knowledge collides with other knowledge, it produces new knowledge, and the more such interactions occur, the greater the potential for creative ideas in a large organization.
Advocates of a full return to the office argue precisely this, that without direct hallway meetings, creativity and innovation die. “My argument is that working remotely alongside working from the office, in a hybrid manner, allows for very good order and coordination on the one hand, which means that on the days when people do come to the office, knowledge meets knowledge and creates new knowledge. These things are intertwined: when work is orderly and management is high-quality and efficient because remote work requires it, then interactions in the same space can be managed much better instead of being used for technical work that ultimately does not produce innovation,” Koriat says.
Innovation and creativity are different processes. While creativity is part of divergent thinking, finding as many ideas and solutions as possible, innovation is a systematic and orderly process. “Innovation is the process of taking a creative idea and transferring it into an organized process in the organization from the moment it is born until it produces impact. It requires evaluating ideas according to metrics and benchmarks. This process depends on management quality, if management quality is very good, innovation processes will be better.” In his study, he created an index of creativity and innovation among employees and found that organizations allowing work from home showed more creativity and more innovation, with a significant positive impact of tens of percent through teamwork and knowledge sharing. He suggests that organizations measure creativity and innovation before deciding how much to require employees to come to the office.
The price of pivoting in the Founder Mode debate is the stress, strain, and burnout experienced by employees who are now expected to do more with less, be always available, and give up the flexibility that working from home affords. The culture of 996, working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, is part of the same trend that can damage employees’ mental health.
“I think that anyone who enters the world of a startup loves it, is addicted to it, wants it, and has the adventurous instinct of the roller coaster. They want to make an impact. These are the people who go to startups, so I don’t think the new requirements will lead to more stress,” says Yonas. “The ability in a startup to increase productivity through AI is clear. This is already happening, so I don’t think more stress will be created, engagement is always very high, and people want to make a mark. They will simply do it better and more effectively thanks to technology.” The spillover of these requirements to larger companies does not necessarily require longer hours or more office time. “Expect higher, broader expertise and greater productivity,” she says.
The new demand for ‘jack of all trades’ workers reflects a genuine attempt to adapt to the age of AI, unprecedented competition, and the need for agility. But it also places on workers responsibilities and pressures that were previously reserved for founders and senior managers. The price of ‘every employee is a manager’ in the age of AI is often worn-out managers. Yet, at least according to Koriat’s research, this is not inevitable. Innovation does not depend on working from the office or being constantly available, but on quality management and knowledge sharing. All of this is possible even with working two days a week from home.
