If it feels like the bar at work has gotten higher, you may not be imagining it.
As artificial intelligence sweeps across industries and becomes embedded in everyday workflows, it is raising standards and expectations, and reshaping how we judge workers, an AI product leader said.
“Customer expectations recalibrate to AI’s consistency,” Svetlana Makarova, who works in AI technical product management at IKS Health and was a former AI product lead at Mayo Clinic, told Business Insider.
Makarova calls this shift a “humanity discount” — a subtle dynamic in which the very traits that make people human, such as variability, judgment, and emotion, are becoming liabilities in the age of AI.
“Human workers begin to face unrealistic standards for productivity, patience, and availability,” she added. “Unlike people, AI never has a bad day.”
How work became scripted
The trend didn’t start with AI, Makarova said.
For decades, companies have optimized jobs for efficiency, breaking them into repeatable tasks and standardizing outputs through scripts, templates, and performance metrics, she said.
That made scaling and automating work easier, she added.
“Following an exact script is what enables a machine to perform that task better,” Makarova said. “If the work has been scripted, it’s been prepared for automation.”
Now, AI is accelerating that shift.
AI systems trained on years of structured workflows — from customer service calls to report writing and documentation — can replicate those tasks with growing accuracy, especially in fields like sales, legal, technical development, and research, she said.
On the flip side, interacting with emotionally responsive AI is subtly shifting expectations of human behavior.
“Interacting with AI that performs emotional intelligence is quietly lowering how human we judge other people to be,” she said.
The result is a workplace where more is expected, often without workers realizing why.
“While AI brings efficiencies, knowledge workers are busier than ever in their existing roles due to the increased perceived productivity we can now deliver with the help of these [AI] agents in the same roles,” she added.
What AI can’t replace
To stay competitive, Makarova said workers should focus on what AI can’t replicate: making decisions under uncertainty, reading complex social dynamics, and applying deep expertise.
“The people who catch what AI misses are the ones who can hold ambiguity and make defensible calls when the data is incomplete,” she said.
Makarova’s assessment comes as workers are growing anxious about AI’s impact on their jobs, with many fearing that using the technology could ultimately help train their own replacements.
“The uncomfortable question is how much of that work could honestly be described as following a process someone else designed,” Makarova said. “If the answer is more than half, the scripting has already done its work. Automation is the next logical step.”
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