The number — 40% of employees received AI “workslop” last month, an invisible tax of about $186 per person

AI can produce work that looks finished without being so — “workslop” that its author forwards as-is and the recipient has to redo. A Harvard Business Review study run with Stanford (1,004 U.S. desk workers, September 2025) puts numbers on it: 40% received workslop in the last month, nearly two hours lost each time, about $186 per employee per month — over $9 million a year for a 10,000-person company. AI’s promised productivity gain becomes an illusion when it merely shifts the work onto whoever receives it. For any small or mid-sized firm the rule is simple: count an AI-produced deliverable as a gain only when it ships without rework — define what “finished” means and track the rework rate, not the volume generated.

Source: Harvard Business Review, “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity,” September 22, 2025 (research by BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab; 1,004 U.S. desk workers).