The explosion of AI has prompted many organizations around the world to quickly integrate this tool into their workflows, with the expectation of optimizing efficiency and cutting costs.
However, a new study conducted by Harvard Business Review in collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs shows that AI may be accidentally destroying business productivity through a phenomenon called workslop.
According to the definition, worklop is AI-generated work content that often seems useful but lacks depth and practical value to promote tasks meaningfully.
On social networks, this phenomenon is often called AI slop, but in the office environment, it has become a form of work waste that requires employees and managers to spend more time processing.
The report shows that although the rate of businesses applying AI in work has nearly doubled in just the past year, up to 95% of organizations admit that they have not seen measurable profits from investment in AI.
The reason, according to the researchers, is that employees easily use AI to create long-line reports, professionally formatted slides, or academic summaries... but lack important context. As a result, the recipient had to spend a lot of effort editing or re-roofing.
A survey of 1,150 full-time employees in the US shows that 40% said they had received worklop in the past month.
Notably, only 15.4% of them are standard for continued use. This phenomenon not only occurs between colleagues (40%), but also appears in reports sent to management levels (18%). On average, for each "lop work", employees have to spend about two more hours processing, a hidden cost that reduces the overall productivity of the company.
The study concludes that as AI becomes more and more popular, the risk of flooding due to poor quality content will increase. Instead of focusing only on quantity or speed, businesses need to establish standards for evaluating and training employees to use AI selectively, to ensure that technology truly creates value, instead of turning it into a burden.
