Every week another "AI agent for X" launches. Email triage. Calendar coordination. Sales follow-up. PR reviewer. Slack monitor. Meeting summarizer.
I've installed enough of them to see the pattern. Here's the dirty secret nobody mentions in the launch posts:
These tools don't reduce your work. They multiply your notifications.
Each AI tool is configured to be helpful by default. "Helpful" means: "I noticed this thing — here's a notification." Stack a dozen of those, and instead of one inbox to ignore you have twelve. The signal-to-noise ratio gets worse every time you add an AI to your workflow.
The mainstream answer is "just configure each one." Sure. Spend four hours tuning notification settings every time you add a tool, and another four hours when one of them ships a "smarter notifications" update. That's not productivity. That's notification janitorial work disguised as setup.
