In this op-ed, former Woman of the Year at the B&T Women in Media Awards and founder of The Digital Picnic, Cherie Clonan, highlights why “high performance” culture is no longer sustainable and AI is accelerating the burnout cycle, not fixing it. As agencies and in-house teams race to keep up with AI-driven output expectations, constant availability and client demand, “productivity” is being quietly redefined as endless capacity, with serious consequences for mental health, retention and creative quality.
Before AI entered the conversation, we already had a problem. We just had a better story to tell ourselves about it.
The media, marketing and creative industries have always worn “high performance” as a badge of honour. Long hours, tight deadlines and the ability to juggle ten things at once while responding to Slack, Teams, email and a last-minute brief that somehow became urgent overnight. For years, we called this the cost of doing great work. We rewarded it, promoted it and built entire cultures around it.
What we didn’t do was question whether it was actually working.
Now AI has entered the chat and the story we’ve been telling ourselves is getting harder to sustain.
Here is what’s happening on the ground across agencies and in-house teams right now.
AI is being deployed as the productivity revolution we’ve been waiting for. We have faster workflows, fewer repetitive tasks and more efficient ways of working, which should mean less pressure on people.
But is there less pressure or just higher expectations?
The logic seems straightforward: if AI helps someone complete a task in half the time, that’s a win. Except in most workplaces, that saved time isn’t being returned to employees but instead being immediately absorbed into more deliverables, more content, more reporting, more output. These productivity gains are converted into a new, higher baseline for performance which means the treadmill gets faster,
This is what I call the Performance Paradox: the very systems organisations have built to drive performance are the systems that are undermining it and the explosion of AI has made this a paradox impossible to ignore.
The uncomfortable truth is that many of the behaviours we celebrate as signs of high performance were never really about performance at all. They were about anxiety, fear, perfectionism and a deep reluctance to disappoint. The employee who never switches off gets praised. The person answering emails at midnight becomes the benchmark. The team member who accepts an unsustainable workload gets called committed, right up until the moment they burn out.
Then we treat it as their problem. They lack resilience and should find tools to enhance their wellbeing. We rarely stop to ask whether the system was designed to produce exactly this outcome.
In the creative industries, this matters more than most leaders want to acknowledge. Our most valuable outputs don’t come from volume or velocity, but from judgment, creativity, strategic thinking and human connection. These are precisely the capabilities that suffer first under sustained pressure and precisely the capabilities AI cannot replicate.
We are burning through the very thing our industry runs on, and calling it high performance.
Most organisations measure what work produces, yet almost none measure what work demands.
They track output, utilisation and revenue, but rarely track fatigue, cognitive overload or psychological safety and the cost of this blind spot is becoming impossible to dismiss.
- Australia is experiencing rising rates of burnout, stress-related illness and psychological injury.
- One in two Australians will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime.
- Workers experiencing psychological injuries have significantly lower return-to-work rates than those recovering from physical injuries.
- Workplace stress costs more than $500 billion annually in lost productivity and more than 550 million working hours.
For an industry built on human thinking, those numbers should be a strategic concern, not just an HR one.
The agencies and businesses that thrive in the AI era won’t be the ones that simply automate the most tasks, they’ll be the ones that make a deliberate choice about what to do with the gains.
This means investing in management capability because good individual contributors don’t automatically become good leaders, and yet most organisations still assume they do. It means measuring wellbeing alongside performance, not instead of it. It means deciding, consciously and explicitly, how productivity gains are distributed rather than quietly converting them into higher expectations.
Most of all, it means retiring the idea that sustainability and high performance are competing priorities.
We can raise the bar again, absorb the gains and call it progress, or we can finally ask what high performance was supposed to be for in the first place.
Because if all AI does is help us burn out faster, we haven’t solved the problem.
We’ve just automated it.
