AI isn’t suddenly “proving” neurodivergent people were right, what it's doing is making certain ways of working profitable.

🤖 #AI isn’t suddenly “proving” neurodivergent people were right, what it's doing is making certain ways of working profitable.

If you’ve been paying attention to recent coverage, the story is messy:

Harvard Business Review has been publishing pieces showing AI can increase productivity while also intensifying work and expectations.

At the same time, outlets like Fortune are reporting on “AI brain fry” and rising cognitive overload.

It's both. Because AI won't fix bad systems, but it can scale them.

This intersects with #neurodivergence. A lot of what’s being framed as “AI-enabled productivity” isn’t new, it’s just newly legitimized.

🧠 Offloading memory.

🧩 Breaking tasks down externally.

🏭 Automating repetitive work.

🗓️ Working asynchronously instead of in constant interruption.

These are things many #neurodivergent people have been doing to survive work environments that weren’t designed for them.

Now those same behaviours are being packaged as innovation.

And yes, there’s also a noticeable shift in how neurodivergent talent is being talked about.

Forbes and others are calling it a competitive advantage, especially in tech and AI-adjacent roles.

There’s some truth there; with the right conditions, performance improves.

But let’s not confuse that with a values shift when it's an economic one.

Even the OECD is pointing out that AI can make work more adaptive and accessible for neurodivergent people, while also warning about unequal access and poor implementation.

That tension is the important part of all of this, because if these tools increase output, organizations can just as easily respond by:

📈 Raising expectations

💨 Speeding everything up

🆘 Reducing tolerance for human limits

Same system, just more efficient.

So no, AI isn’t validating neurodivergent people.

It’s creating conditions where certain ways of working become easier to see, easier to scale, and easier to monetize.

What happens next is about whether organizations redesign work… or just squeeze more out of people.

🧐 I'm curious what you think? How has AI impacted your work, for better or for worse?