There's a new term floating around in the corporate world: Botsitting.
Botsitting occurs when employees waste their productive time trying to prompt AI to produce something usable, and it may be why companies are not seeing the returns they hoped for with their AI investments.
We've reported on companies' multi-billion dollar miscalculation with AI previously.
But no one could quite explain why companies were losing so much money incorporating AI.
However, a new study out of Glean's AI Work Institute may be able to shed some light on the issue.
First off, both employees and their bosses are sure AI is helping them with their work output.
87% of digital workers now use AI at work. 75% say it makes them more productive, saving them roughly 11 hours each per week through automation alone.
However, that production boost hasn't translated to the companies' bottom lines.
Yet only 13% say their organization is performing significantly better as a result.
This is where the botsitting issue comes in:
For every hour a worker spends getting useful output from AI, they spend roughly another hour making it usable. Of the total time workers spend interacting with AI each week, 37% goes to botsitting, 36% to actually using the tool to produce work, and 27% to learning the tools and building agents.
In other words, the employees are working diligently, and they're producing things, but it is mostly useless, wasted energy.
(This is also how government programs work.)
Additionally, the study found that the more the employees used AI, the less botsitting they did — instead they just became comfortable with "workslop," a gradual lowering of standards.
69% of employees [using AI] were found to have turned in AI-generated work that workers haven't verified, don't fully understand, or can't confidently stand behind.
Honestly, that last bit explains a lot of what's happening in the world right now.
Watch our latest video 👇
