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Numerous medium and large organisations have quickly incorporated AI tools into their workflow to optimise their productivity, but a new study claims only a handful of people are seeing it “create real value.”
While the number of companies that have adopted artificial intelligence to boost their processes has nearly doubled in the last year, with AI use doubling at work since 2023, a recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that almost 95 per cent of organisations have noticed no measurable returns on their AI investment.
According to a study by Harvard Business Review in collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs, one reason this might be happening is that employees are using AI tools to generate low-effort content, which might eventually end up creating more work for their coworkers.
On social media platforms, this content is often referred to as “AI slop”, but in the context of work, the study has named the phenomenon “workslop”, which is defined as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”
The study explains that as AI tools become more accessible to employees, they are quick to generate “well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code.” However, most workers seem to be using AI tools to generate unhelpful, incomplete content or things that are missing crucial context about a project. The problem with this type of content is that it transfers the burden to the receiver, who has to correct or redo the work.
According to an ongoing survey by Stanford University and BetterUp, out of 1,150 US-based full-time employees, 40 per cent say they have received workslop in the last month, out of which only 15.4 per cent of content qualifies for work.
While 40 per cent of this phenomenon happens between coworkers, around 18 per cent of managers are also getting workslop in the form of reports. Workers say they have to spend an average of around two hours every time they receive a workslop, which in turn leads to an increase in hidden costs for the company itself.
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Since workslop is affecting multiple organisations, the amount of time wasted on fixing workslop amounts to thousands of lost workdays every year. The study also cited a retail director who was frustrated by workslop. “I had to waste more time following up on the information and checking it with my own research. I then had to waste even more time setting up meetings with other supervisors to address the issue. Then I continued to waste my own time having to redo the work itself.”
