Overview

• BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab, writing in Harvard Business Review, define “workslop” as polished yet unhelpful AI output and report that 40% of 1,150 U.S. full-time employees encountered it in the past month.
• Recipients spent about 1 hour 56 minutes dealing with each incident, an estimated hidden cost of roughly $186 per employee per month that can exceed $9 million a year for a 10,000-person company.
• Workers said about 15.4% of the content they receive qualifies as workslop, most commonly from peers, with 16% arriving from managers or more senior staff.
• Interpersonal damage is significant, with 54% viewing senders as less creative, 42% as less trustworthy, and 37% as less intelligent, reducing willingness to collaborate.
• The findings offer a concrete mechanism for MIT Media Lab’s result that 95% of GenAI pilots show no measurable ROI, prompting recommendations for AI literacy, clear guardrails, role-specific guidance, and “anti-workslop” workshops.