The Work AI Institute has published a study on how much hidden human labor is required to make AI usable in the workplace. Here are interesting findings from the report:
- The gains of using AI “keep evaporating somewhere between the worker’s desk and the board deck.” Workers say “AI automation alone saves them roughly 11 hours a week (just under a third of their work week). But only 13% say their organization has significantly improved performance and outcomes because of it.”
- The evaporated gains are going towards the “human labor of making AI itself usable.” This is called botsitting, a term borrowed from babysitting, which is the hidden labor of making AI usable, such as feeding it context, monitoring output, and cleaning up mistakes, to name a few.
- Sheer volume (“AI doesn’t usually clean up after itself”) and tool sprawl (“the sheer number of AI tools workers juggle in a given week”) are driving botsitting.
- This gives rise to toggle tax, which is the cumulative cost of time, attention, and sanity “of switching between disconnected AI tools, apps, and systems, as the worker carries context, data, and intent from one tool to the next.”
- As the AI toggle tax increases, workers begin to cognitively offload, leading to botshitting. Here, workers unconfidently send out AI-generated work that is misunderstood and hasn’t been verified.
- The organizations that are succeeding at AI transformations are not trying to fix problems by adding more tools but are “doing the harder work of treating AI as a work-design problem, not a procurement one… they’re doing it at every level: individual, team, and organizational… and are measuring whether the work produced is better, not just faster.”
Image by Martinet Sinan from Pixabay
June 29, 2026
