Overview

• Harvard Business Review’s BetterUp Labs with Stanford’s Social Media Lab define “workslop” as AI-generated output that looks polished but does not meaningfully advance a task.
• In an ongoing survey of 1,150 U.S. full-time employees, 40% reported receiving workslop in the past month.
• Recipients spent an average of 1 hour 56 minutes per incident, which researchers estimate equals about $186 per employee each month and roughly $9 million a year for a 10,000-person company.
• Nearly half of the low-quality items came from peers, with 18% from direct reports and 16% from managers, and recipients reported lower trust and reduced willingness to collaborate.
• Researchers point to model limits and vague top-down AI mandates as drivers and recommend clear guardrails, manager modeling, and defined use cases; the pattern offers a plausible link to the weak ROI flagged by MIT Media Lab.