The Care Work Crisis in AI Transformation

The Director of People Operations had been tracking a metric that didn’t appear on any of her company’s AI adoption dashboards. She called it “the care tax.”

Every week, she asked her team of HR business partners to log the time they spent on AI-adoption-related support: coaching managers through employee resistance, mediating conflicts, supporting employees who felt left behind, helping teams redesign workflows disrupted by new AI tools.

The official metrics told a story of successful transformation. The care tax told a different story. In the first six months, her team had spent 2,400 hours on AI-adoption-related support work. None of it appeared in any budget line. All of it was absorbed by a team of predominantly female HR professionals who were already at capacity.

“We’re being asked to make the transformation work,” she told me. “But we’re not being counted as part of it.”

The Invisible Infrastructure of AI Transformation

Every major organizational transformation creates care work — the labor of supporting people through change, managing the emotional and relational dimensions of disruption, and holding teams together while the ground shifts beneath them.

Dr. Nancy Folbre, the feminist economist, defines care work as labor that involves “the development and maintenance of human capabilities.”^[1]

AI transformation amplifies the demand for care work:

AI tools change workflows faster than people can adapt. Every disruption creates a care work demand.

AI adoption creates visible competence gaps. The visibility creates anxiety, resentment, and status threat — all requiring care work to manage.

AI tools raise fundamental questions about the nature of work. These existential questions require thoughtful, individualized support.

Who Bears the Care Work Burden

The care work created by AI transformation falls disproportionately on women, mid-level managers, and HR professionals.^[2]

A 2024 McKinsey study found women managers burning out at significantly higher rates, with “managing team well-being” cited as a primary driver.^[3]

Caroline Criado Perez’s research on the gender data gap demonstrates that when care work is invisible in data, it is invisible in decisions.^[4]

The Economics of Invisible Care

Burnout costs. The Society for Human Resource Management estimates replacing an employee costs 50–200% of their annual salary.^[5]

Quality degradation costs. Care work done by exhausted workers is lower quality.

Transformation failure costs. John Kotter’s research documents the 70% failure rate of major change initiatives.^[6]

Designing for Care Work Visibility

Step 1: Conduct a Care Work Audit. Map the care work your transformation will create.

Step 2: Budget for Care Work Explicitly. Build care work costs into the transformation budget.

Step 3: Measure Care Work in Transformation Metrics. Add care work indicators to your dashboard.

Step 4: Redistribute Care Work Deliberately. Design structures that spread the burden equitably.

The Feminist Economics of AI Transformation

Joan Tronto’s framework of care ethics argues that care requires political and institutional support to be sustainable.^[7]

The organizations that will achieve sustainable AI adoption are the ones that design for the full cost of transformation — including the human cost.

References

1. Folbre, N. (2001). The Invisible Heart. New Press.
2. Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart. UC Press.
3. McKinsey. (2024). Women in the Workplace 2024. Link
4. Criado Perez, C. (2019). Invisible Women. Abrams Press.
5. SHRM. (2022). The True Cost of Employee Turnover.
6. Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change. HBR, 73(2), 59–67.
7. Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral Boundaries. Routledge.