IA on the job: can you pause a case without keeping it on your mind?
Within the “IA on the job” programme at SHR — Swiss Human Resources, tool integration deserves attention at the level of transitions between tasks. What should a manager ask employees to do before they pause a case to review an AI response?
What the literature establishes
Sophie Leroy (2009, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) provides experimental evidence that some attention can remain attached to the previous task when people switch tasks. This “attention residue” can impair performance on the next activity, particularly when the work left behind is unfinished. Making a response available therefore does not necessarily make its recipient ready to review it.
Planning the return makes it easier to step away
Sophie Leroy and Theresa M. Glomb (2018, Organization Science) examine interruptions when people anticipate time pressure upon returning to their initial task. Their research shows that a brief ready-to-resume plan can reduce attention residue and protect performance on the interrupting task. The mechanism is not about finishing the case, but about specifying how to resume it before stepping away.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that a resumption note makes it acceptable to deal with every AI response immediately. These studies show neither that interruptions become cost-free nor that they are preferable to uninterrupted work. Instead, they suggest distinguishing whether an interruption is necessary from how to organise one that is already justified. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings do not establish
These studies do not concern today’s generative assistants or Geneva’s professional settings. Applying their findings to the review of an AI response is a transfer hypothesis, not a directly demonstrated benefit. Measuring only the time between a response arriving and being opened would also miss the point: opening it quickly does not demonstrate attentive review.
A practical check in Genève
In Geneva, a programme exercise could use fictional cases from private banking, an international organisation, luxury watchmaking or commodity trading, without exposing confidential data. During scheduled interruptions to review an AI response, compare the usual transition with one preceded by a note stating the stopping point and next action, using cases of comparable difficulty and alternating the order of the conditions. The main measure would be the proportion of predefined anomalies correctly identified in the response, assessed against a rubric established before the exercise. Recording the time spent writing the note would also allow discussion of its cost, without presenting this local test as general proof. To go further: explore the AI on the Job training in Geneva in the canton of Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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