Beat Burnout, Find Flourishing: The AI Edition
AI tools are an amplifier. They don’t just amplify productivity, they amplify whatever dynamics already exist in a team.
Steve Yegge calls it the Dracula Effect: AI coding at full speed is vampiric, draining engineers faster than anyone expected.
We’ve got to defend our teams against burnout and help them amplify the dynamics that nudge towards flourishing. In this talk, I’ll present a practical framework and patterns for doing exactly that — drawn from peer-reviewed research and real experience leading a team shipping with AI tools.
Navin Keswani
Navin Keswani is CPTO and co-founder at TANK, where he’s building tools and methods to end burnout, grounded in peer-reviewed research from neuroscience, organisational psychology and performance science. He is also Fractional CPTO at Endgame Analytics, leading an engineering team building quantitative analysis products for energy markets — a team actively shipping with AI tools. Navin holds a PhD in pure mathematics and draws on two decades of engineering leadership to bridge the gap between how teams actually work under pressure and what the research says about sustainable performance. He has presented on achieving sustainable performance while defending against burnout at Sydney Tech Leaders, REA and /New conference.