How a Chinese AI product manager increased productivity—and exhaustion

CHINA: Companies in China are exploring the immense potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive innovation, resulting in soaring productivity for Vivi Mengjie Xiao, an AI product manager. Still, she says her exhaustion has gone beyond the roof.

She says she created six AI employees to increase her productivity, all born from a real problem she was experiencing. They are split between her work and personal life.

Before the AI agents, she used to spend around four hours a day gathering AI industry news, such as reading posts on X, newsletters, blog posts, and translating English sources into Chinese.

She then thought: "Can I automate this? If AI can handle information gathering, what else can it do? If I'm doing something repetitive, I should automate it."

In one case, she was getting distracted easily in managing her calendar, so she created an OpenClaw agent and tried to make it do everything.

"I kept stuffing other tasks into it as well, such as assigning it to manage my finances.

"The result of putting all of that on one lobster was that its context became long and messy. It basically became ADHD like me: jumping from one thing to another without helping me focus.

"It was running three work streams at once. That wasn't going to work, so I split tasks up and assigned them to different lobsters (a nickname given to agents created on Open Claw by Chinese developers)," she told Business Insider in an interview.

She realised she became not only more productive but also more tired. Her workday did not get shorter, but instead, she shifted from doing "grunt work" to doing more creative, strategic, and high-leverage work.

"I'm more productive by any conventional metric. Honestly, I'm also more tired. This is a paradox I've been thinking about: When your efficiency goes up, you don't work less. You just attempt more."

She concluded, saying we are witnessing a fundamental shift in what "work" means.

For her, the future of work is "one-person studios," solo creators and operators who leverage AI to produce at team-level scale. 

In the end, it is not about replacing humans. It's about liberating humans to do more human work, she says.