AI is cutting hours of office work, but also creating a new kind of busywork

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As the use of artificial intelligence spreads across companies worldwide, it is relieving workers of tedious old chores but creating new ones.A new survey of individuals using AI found it made them more productive, saving each roughly 11 hours per week.

But at the same time, the workers on average have to spend more than six hours “botsitting,” checking the AI output, fixing mistakes and rerunning the prompt.“Most people don’t realize the amount of time that they’re spending working on the tools to get the time savings that they’re professing,” said Paul Leonardi, Duca Family professor of technology management at UC Santa Barbara.Leonardi is one of the co-authors of the new study published by the Work AI Institute, whose contributors include academics from Stanford University and UC Berkeley.The institute is sponsored by AI company Glean.

Leonardi said its research output maps broad trends in understanding AI’s impact on work.The research surveyed 6,000 digital workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia between December and January.The report found that we are in a phase of significant personal productivity gains, but few companies are translating these gains into revenue and business growth.While 75% of individuals reported a boost in productivity, only 13% of the organizations say they have seen significant business gains as a result of AI adoption, the survey found.The survey analyzed anonymized, aggregated workplace data from companies using the Glean Work AI platform, a private search tool used to manage their internal information.Over the past six months, Silicon Valley companies have been urging their employees to max out their AI use .

But the benefits of merely maximizing AI usage have been unclear, with instances such as Uber burning through their entire 2026 AI budget in four months, without shipping a usable feature.The reaso...