Botsitting: Workers spend nearly a full day each week managing AI tools, study finds

White-collar workers spend an average of 6.4 hours per week managing AI tools rather than benefiting from them. Thibault Spirlet reports for Business Insider on a new study from Glean’s Work AI Institute, conducted with researchers from Notre Dame, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, which surveyed 6,000 full-time workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

The researchers coined the term “botsitting” to describe the overlooked labor required to make AI useful: feeding tools context, verifying outputs, fixing errors, and moving information between disconnected systems.

A productivity paradox

The numbers reveal a sharp contradiction. While 75% of surveyed workers said AI makes them more productive, only 13% said their organization was performing significantly better as a result. Much of the missing productivity gain appears to be absorbed by botsitting.

Rebecca Hinds, head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and one of the report’s authors, described botsitting as “often tedious” and “exhausting” work that is “not rewarded and it’s not appreciated or tracked or measured and certainly not incentivized within the organization.”

The burden is also affecting retention. Workers who spend an unusually large share of their AI time on botsitting are 73% more likely to be actively looking for a new job. In some cases, employees are being asked to automate the parts of their jobs they find most meaningful, such as building customer relationships, and instead supervise AI agents. Hinds warned that removing this source of meaning from work “is very dangerous.”

What the leading companies do differently

The report suggests the solution is not simply deploying more AI. Organizations seeing the strongest results focus on the work around AI:

• Giving employees access to the right context
• Training staff to use tools effectively
• Setting clear standards for AI-assisted work
• Deciding which tasks should not be handed to AI at all

Without these measures, the report warns, companies risk continued botsitting costs and the gradual loss of employees who grow tired of cleaning up after the tools.