AI as a Second Job

The lines under "How it sounds" are typical phrasing we wrote, not quotes from clients or interviews.

How it sounds

• “Our IT director is handling AI on top of everything else.”
• “She's the one who's into AI, so it's hers now.”
• “We'll get to the AI plan after the busy season.”

What it looks like

AI gets added to the CTO's, CIO's or IT director's list, or to whoever showed interest first, like the person who built a quick app with an AI coding tool. The interested volunteer is the most common version: someone keen offers to lead, and they're often the best person for it. They're capable and willing, and they still have no time for both jobs, so the work stalls, takes much longer than it should and drifts without a clear focus. The AI work happens in the gaps between their real job, gets dropped every time the day job calls, and has to be picked back up from scratch.

Why it happens

The owner can't justify a full-time hire for a job nobody has defined yet, and handing it to a trusted person feels efficient. It's the Hero Culture loop: the more the company relies on one person, the busier they get, and the less room they have for the new work. The person is never the problem. The setup asks them to do two jobs in the hours of one.

What it costs

• Salary. A senior IT leader giving AI 20 hours a week: 20 × 48 = 960 hours a year, at about $130.31 an hour, comes to $125,100 a year, half of that leader's loaded salary. The closest federal pay category, computer and information systems managers (11-3021), has a US median wage of $175,140 (BLS OEWS, May 2025). Loaded at BLS ECEC's 70.0% wages share, that's $175,140 ÷ 0.700 = $250,200, and $250,200 ÷ 1,920 working hours = $130.31.
• Switching. In a UC Irvine study of 24 information workers, interrupted work took an average of 25 minutes 26 seconds to resume, and 22.8% of it wasn't resumed the same day (Mark, Gonzalez and Harris, CHI 2005). APA's summary of task-switching research says people lose more time on each switch when the tasks are complex or unfamiliar (APA, 2006), and AI work is both for most people today.
• Priorities. In PMI's Pulse of the Profession 2018 (5,402 project professionals), 39% named "change in organization's priorities" as a primary cause of failed projects, first on the list.
• Time. In the Federal Reserve Banks' 2026 Small Business Credit Survey, 25% of employer firms using AI and 37% of those planning to named "time to implement or train employees" as a challenge.

First move

Count the hours. Ask the person carrying AI how much time they gave it last month and what got dropped to make room. Then decide on purpose: protect that time in writing, or give AI to someone whose job it is.

The fifteen patterns, with what each one costs and a first move, are in The AI anti-pattern field guide.

Someone should own AI at your company.

An AI strategy decides who owns the work, which tools stay, and what changes first.

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