When was the last time you felt proud of your work – not because you ticked off a to-do list, but because your mind felt alive, ideas flowed freely, and your imagination was firing on all cylinders?

That was the opening challenge Rahaf Harfoush posed at Zoom’s Work Transformation Summit 2025. In her keynote presentation, she dismantled the myths that still underpin the way we work – namely, that busyness equals productivity, and that rest must be earned.

“The real measure of success won't be how many emails we send or how many hours we log,” she said. “It will be how well we use these new tools to create work that matters, to create work that inspires, to create work that makes us proud, not because we were busy, but because we were able to be creative.”

For Harfoush, whose work as a digital anthropologist delves deep into the intersection of tech, innovation, and culture, the stakes are clear: in a world increasingly reshaped by AI, redefining productivity is critical.

From the factory floor to the knowledge economy

“We keep asking brains designed for bursts of insight to run like machines, eight hours straight, every day, with the same levels of energy, focus, and attention forever,” Harfoush said.

She argues that much of today’s work culture is built on industrial-age logic. The eight-hour workday, popularised by Henry Ford, might have made sense for factory output but, when applied to knowledge work, it becomes absurd.

“Back then it made economic sense. But we’ve imported that framework wholesale into knowledge work, where tasks are no longer physical and repetitive, but cognitive and exploratory,” Harfoush said.

The result is a staggering mismatch between human cognition and work design.

Study after study shows that knowledge workers are truly productive for between three and four hours a day.”

And even during those few productive hours, focus is repeatedly shattered by emails, pings, and meetings that carve the day into disconnected chunks.

Visible effort vs invisible incubation

“We applaud visible effort because it’s easy to measure. We distrust invisible incubation because it looks like nothing,” she said.

In the assembly-line mindset, what you can see is what you can value. But in creative and strategic work, Harfoush noted, the most valuable insights often emerge when it looks like you’re doing nothing.

Divergent thinking is exactly what businesses pay for when they ask for innovation.”

But here’s the rub. “Divergent thinking is where the magic happens ... and divergent thinking suffocates in a calendar packed so tight with obligations that there's no room to breathe,” she pointed out.

The AI wildcard: Threat or ally?

As AI continues its march into every industry, Harfoush warns that how we choose to use it will either turbocharge burnout or unlock breakthrough creativity.

“If we use it badly, it will simply accelerate the hamster wheel ... but if we use it well, AI can help us redesign work from the inside out,” she said.

One example she gave was BNY Mellon’s adoption of GitHub Copilot. Far from making engineers complacent, it elevated their work.

“Routine syntax became the AI’s job, but generative leaps remained firmly human.”

With AI scaffolding code and fixing bugs, developers could shift their energy toward architecture, security, and delight, a.k.a. the human side of software.

The same principle applies across disciplines:

“An account manager who comes up with one brilliant new client concept in an afternoon of flow is far more productive than one who spent a whole day answering emails,” Harfoush said.

And that shift – from ticking off tasks to creating space for ideas – is where AI shines, when paired with thoughtful leadership.

Focus is oxygen, not a luxury

“Imagine if every day you could count on two whole hours of unbroken focus instead of hoping for surprise pockets between meetings. That’s not a perk. That is an oxygen.”

Harfoush paints a future where AI doesn’t just accelerate work, but protects what matters most: our ability to think.

This includes smart scheduling that defends 90-minute focus blocks and dashboards that nudge workers to rest based on real-time cognitive fatigue data.

What if AI was a digital pit crew engineer protecting our engine of creativity?”

To truly benefit, organisations must stop treating rest as indulgent and start seeing it as fuel.

“Recovery often looks like idleness … but we should treat energy management as performance architecture,” Harfoush said.

The co-creation revolution

“Co-creation is a dance,” the expert said, expressing enthusiasm about using AI as a collaborator, not a crutch.

“Studies show that creativity flourishes not when humans just passively accept AI's first output, but when they actively co-create,” she said.

In a recent study, teams that brainstormed with AI performed better than those who either worked solo or simply edited AI drafts.

“The tools provide rapid permutations, the person provides direction, taste, ethical judgment ... and together they make something that neither could do alone,” she said.

In other words, AI isn’t the star – it’s the sous-chef. The strategist still steers the ship.

From output obsession to creativity obsession

“If you adopt AI purely as a speed multiplier without revising culture, you risk saturating staff in low value tasks faster,” Harfoush said.

The expert cautions against digital Taylorism – using AI to squeeze more juice from the same lemons. Instead, she calls for a pivot to “a creativity obsession”.

This shift requires leaders to model new behaviours, like defending their own thinking time or celebrating a colleague who skips a meeting to chase an insight.

Instead of asking “what did you do today?” leaders should be asking, “what did you discover or improve upon today?”

Personalised productivity and morale

“AI can help adopt to work to an individual’s unique energetic and creative rhythms, which helps improve performance, too,” Harfoush said.

This human-centred approach changes the rhythm of the daily grind.

If someone enjoys working early in the morning, for example, they can complete their creative tasks through deep work while offloading less essential work to AI throughout the day.

Or, if someone hates documentation, AI takes the wheel while the human does the more creative work.

“They know that their strengths are maximised and their weak points are mitigated,” Harfoush noted.

This is especially valuable for remote or global teams using platforms like Zoom. AI tools can now summarise key meeting moments and maintain continuity across time zones, so no one’s left in the dark.

The culture shift we need

“Everyone wants to get more done, but the real work is the mental heavy lifting of rewiring our inherited impulses,” Harfoush said.

“Think of the writers who intentionally block unscheduled dead time after a draft because that stillness lets the narrative percolate.”

Harfoush challenges us to see that the future isn’t about churning out more content but about discerning what matters:

Imagination, curiosity, pattern recognition – these human talents will move to centre stage. Without them, AI is just noise, infinity pages of plausible nonsense.”

As AI steps into the frame, the future of work will be written not just in code, but in culture. Harfoush makes it clear: tools matter, but values will decide the outcome.

If leaders take this message to heart, the AI age won’t just be more productive — it will be more human. And more inspired.