Industry leaders keep repeating that AI is saving workers time: just turn it on for the most repetitive and boring tasks, and you’ll have more freedom to unleash your creativity. Well, that’s not happening, a new report has found.
The report from Glean’s Work AI Institute, prepared together with researchers from universities including Notre Dame, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, is extremely telling.
It found that white-collar workers – 6,000 of them were surveyed in the US, the UK, and Australia – spend an average of 6.4 hours a week “botsitting” AI – feeding it context, checking outputs, debugging mistakes, and cleaning up errors.
In other words, all this needs to be done to make AI actually useful because so far, the gains are difficult to find.
True, according to the report, 75% of digital workers say AI makes them more productive and saves them around 11 hours each per week. Yet only 13% say their organization is performing significantly better as a result.
“So where are the gains going? They’re being swallowed by a new, largely invisible form of labor,” authors of the report claim.
“We call it botsitting: the work required to make AI usable, including feeding it missing context, checking its outputs, debugging its mistakes, rerunning prompts, and cleaning up the confident-but-wrong answers AI leaves behind.”
Talking on the “Cognitive Revolution” podcast this week, Rebecca Hinds, head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and one of the report’s authors, described botsitting as “tedious, exhausting” work which isn’t rewarded or appreciated by upper management.
The unfortunate burden is hitting employee morale, the report further shows. Apparently, workers who spend a lot of time botsitting AI are 73% more likely to be actively looking for another job.
Since there’s no tracking for these types of tasks, those who stay on start cutting corners: they stop checking outputs and deliver work they can’t fully explain.
“That’s when botsitting turns into something more dangerous: botshitting – shipping AI-generated work that workers haven’t reviewed, don’t fully understand, or couldn’t defend if asked. Today, 69% of AI users admit to botshitting at work,” the report says.
The managers, by embracing AI usage, have trapped workers between two AI threats at once: the threat of being replaced by AI, and the threat of looking obsolete if they don’t use enough of it.
The deeper damage is what happens beneath the surface. Once people stop doing the thinking themselves, they stop feeling ownership over the work and stop feeling responsible for it.
When the work lands well (or when the botshitting goes undetected), employees take the credit, often pointing to their AI fluency as proof of their “initiative” and effort. When it fails, they blame the tool.
Researchers have a name for this psychological distancing: moral disengagement. It’s the gradual mental process by which people stop holding themselves accountable for harmful or careless behavior.
Three groups botshit more than the rest, by the way: Gen Z workers, men, and managers.
The managers, by embracing AI usage, have trapped workers between two AI threats at once: the threat of being replaced by AI, and the threat of looking obsolete if they don’t use enough of it, the report points out.
“They’re baking AI fluency into performance reviews, making it a condition for new headcount, stack-ranking employees by token counts, and showing laggards the door. In that climate, standing still doesn’t protect your expertise. It paints a target on your back,” says the report.
The trend is worrying. A month ago, another report found that AI was behind 26% of all job cuts in America in April. Unsurprisingly, the tech industry fired most workers.
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