Dive Brief:
- Digital workers now spend nearly one full workday a week “botsitting,” according to a report recently released by Glean. This work includes everything required to make artificial intelligence usable, including checking outputs, debugging mistakes and fixing “confident-but-wrong” answers, the AI company said.
- With botsitting exhausting workers, many turn to what Glean terms “botshitting”: “shipping AI-generated work that workers haven’t reviewed, don’t fully understand, or couldn’t defend if asked.” Nearly 7 in 10 AI users admitted to this behavior, Glean found, with heavy AI users, Generation Z, men and managers most likely to engage in it.
- How can companies pull out of this cycle? Instead of focusing on quantity-heavy strategies like “tokenmaxxing,” or maximum use of AI tokens, successful companies focus on setting context, defining what “good” looks like, building judgment and other parameters related to AI use itself, Glean said.
Dive Insight:
As organizations have pushed AI in a bid to not be left behind, the Glean report painted a picture of employees who feel overwhelmed and disengaged as a result of excessive AI tool use — and AI-generated work that is increasingly error-ridden, sloppy and without substance.
“As the AI toggle tax increases, workers begin to cognitively offload,” the Glean authors wrote. “They hand more of their thinking and judgment over to the machine. They start to cut corners. They stop checking outputs, verifying sources, and asking whether the AI’s recommendations make any sense.”
Glean said the process is a “slow surrender of agency,” rather than a single bad decision. “First, workers stop fully understanding the output,” the report said. “Then they stop interrogating it. Eventually, they stop feeling responsible for it at all.”
Workers who’ve surrendered this agency also tended to blame AI for problems with the work. Twenty-eight percent of AI users have blamed AI for bad outputs, but among heavy users, that rate rose to 41%.
Glean surveyed 6,000 full-time digital workers across the U.S. (3,000), the U.K. (1,500) and Australia (1,500). It conducted the survey in December and January.
In addition to the proliferation of “workslop,” excessive AI use can result in employees who are worn out, disengaged and eyeing the door. Glean found that frequent botsitters — those who spend 40% of more of their time on botsitting activities — were 73% more likely than their peers to be actively hunting for another job.
Glean’s analysis was further able to break down its findings by role, and it noted HR has higher-than-average levels of AI adoption, with 90% of surveyed HR professionals reporting they used the tech. HR uses AI more in low-stakes applications, Glean said, including writing content and for coordination and administration.
However, Glean said, “HR workers are more likely than the average employee to report that AI is already shaping consequential people decisions,” and roughly one-third of HR pros said AI is involved in hiring decisions.
The use of AI in hiring decisions has been at the center of a high-profile lawsuit against HR vendor Workday, among the earliest cases to apply a theory of AI-based discrimination. Plaintiffs in the case, which Workday has yet to shake, alleged they were automatically rejected for positions they’d applied for based on protected characteristics like age and race.
