AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
‘Workslop’: AI-Generated Work Content Is Slowing Everything Down AI slop has infiltrated the workplace, costing companies time and money. AI slop isn’t limited to cringey cat videos on Facebook anymore; it has made its way into the workplace. The Harvard Business Review recently coined a term for low-quality, AI-generated work documents—workslop. The respected business publication argues that this growing pile of phoned-in memos and reports is one reason many companies are seeing little return on their AI investments. • Harvard Business Review warns that a surge of low-quality, AI-generated documents—dubbed “workslop”—is dragging down company productivity. The report ties the phenomenon to lackluster returns on corporate AI investments. • In a survey of 1,150 U.S. full-time employees, 40% said they had received workslop in the past month and spent nearly two hours per incident cleaning it up. Researchers estimate the hidden cost at about $186 per employee per month, potentially totaling millions for large firms. • Workslop forces recipients to interpret or redo tasks, shifting effort downstream and nullifying promised efficiency gains. Over half of surveyed workers felt annoyed or confused by such outputs and viewed senders as less capable, eroding trust inside teams
AI slop isn’t limited to cringey cat videos on Facebook anymore; it has made its way into the workplace.
The Harvard Business Review recently coined a term for low-quality, AI-generated work documents—workslop. The respected business publication argues that this growing pile of phoned-in memos and reports is one reason many companies are seeing little return on their AI investments.
The report lands as the AI industry keeps booming. The U.N. recently projected the global AI market will rocket from $189 billion in 2023 to a staggering $4.8 trillion by 2033. In the U.S., the share of employees who say they use AI at least a few times a year has nearly doubled from 21% to 40%, according to Gallup. And Accenture reported that the number of companies running fully AI-driven processes nearly doubled in the past year.
But as offices everywhere are scrambling to plug AI tools into their workflows so they don’t get left behind, very few are seeing their efforts actually pay off.
Just last month, an MIT Media Lab study found that fewer than one in ten AI pilot projects delivered real revenue gains and warned that “95 percent of organizations are getting zero return” on their AI bets. Based on 150 executive interviews, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments, the report triggered a dip in AI stocks.
Now, researchers from Harvard Business Review’s BetterUp Labs, working with the Stanford Social Media Lab, are pointing to workslop as a possible culprit behind those disappointing results.
The Harvard Business Review defines workslop as, “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”
This can look like polished presentation slides, eloquent report summaries, and even decent code, but on closer inspection, the work can be missing key context and is ultimately unhelpful.