When AI Makes a Work Task Take Longer, Where Did the Time Go?

A new Epoch AI/Ipsos survey found that roughly one in six AI-assisted work tasks took longer than before. AI saved time on 37% of tasks where it handled part of the work, rising to 53% when it did most or all of the task. Those are worker reports, not stopwatch results, but the slower cases deserve more than a shrug. For one week, put the extra minutes into five buckets: explaining the job, waiting, checking, rerunning, and doing a more thorough version than you would have done without AI. Then look at the finished work. Ten extra minutes that catches a bad number before an invoice goes out is different from ten minutes spent coaxing a routine email into usable shape. The same survey found no consistent relationship between how much an output was edited and whether time was saved. So edit count is a weak shortcut. Measure the whole task and what changed for the person doing it. When AI makes your work slower, is it buying quality—or just adding another thing to manage?