Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
Generative AI has taken over office life at breakneck speed; AI usage at work has doubled since 2023, and the number of companies using fully AI-led processes has nearly doubled as well. Yet nearly 95% of organizations report seeing no measurable return on their AI investments, according to a study by the MIT Media Lab. If AI is supposed to make work more efficient, why isn’t it delivering?
One answer, according to new research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab, is something they’re calling workslop — AI-generated content that looks like good work but is actually low-effort and low-value. It often passes as polished and professional on the surface — well-formatted reports, lengthy meeting notes, plausible summaries — but underneath, it’s empty.
Instead of solving problems, it shifts the burden downstream, forcing colleagues to decode, fix, or redo the work.
Workslop Is Everywhere, and It’s Not Harmless
In a Harvard Business Review survey of over 1,100 full-time U.S. workers, 40% said they’d received workslop in the last month. On average, they estimated that 15% of the content they receive at work qualifies.
The phenomenon mostly happens between peers, but 18% of the time it’s sent from junior staff to managers — and 16% of the time, it flows from the top down.
While generative AI is intended to boost productivity, the unintended side effect is an invisible tax. On average, workers spend nearly two hours dealing with each incident of workslop — fixing the work, asking clarifying questions, or redoing it entirely.
That time translates to a cost of $186 per employee per month. For a 10,000-person company, that’s over $9 million annually in wasted productivity.
But the hidden costs don’t stop there. The study also found emotional and social fallout. Over half of workers say receiving AI-generated junk work makes them feel annoyed or confused. About a third are less likely to want to work with the sender again.
In some cases, workers even viewed their colleagues as less intelligent or less trustworthy after receiving sloppy AI-generated work.
Why Is This Happening?
Workslop is often the result of well-meaning workers using AI without enough direction. The push to “use AI everywhere” has led to indiscriminate use — copying and pasting AI outputs into presentations or emails without checking for context or accuracy. It’s productivity theater: lots of output, very little impact.
And while generative AI has incredible potential, it can’t read minds or understand nuance. Without thoughtful human input, its outputs often miss the mark. That’s especially dangerous in collaborative environments, where clear communication and critical thinking are vital.
What Leaders Can Do About It
Sloppy work isn’t new, but AI has supercharged it. Here’s what organizations can do:
More stories for you
- Set clear standards for AI use. Don’t push blanket mandates. Not every task should involve AI, and not every tool suits every job. Define where and how AI adds value.
- Promote pilot mindsets. Encourage employees to use AI intentionally, not as a shortcut. Model curiosity, creativity, and discernment in your own AI use.
- Treat AI as a collaboration tool. Just like good teamwork, good AI use involves giving clear input, offering feedback, and refining the output, not just handing off responsibility to a machine.
- Don’t accept junk just because it looks polished. Hold AI-assisted work to the same standard you would expect from human-only output. Clarity, accuracy, and insight still matter.
Workslop may be easy to create, but it’s expensive to fix. Without better guidance, companies risk drowning in a sea of convincing but ultimately useless work.
