WORKSLOP Destroying Productivity

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Hello everyone and welcome to my newsletter where I discuss real-world skills needed for the top data jobs and specifically the AI Agent Role. 👏

This week we discuss what workslop is and what’s being done about it.

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While it does sound like something I made up, I didn’t… but I like the word. A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. 

While I’m fully on-board the AI Agent Hype train, this stuff is funny as hell. I simply can’t overemphasize the importance of solid foundation in generative AI. This is what happens when you don’t have on-boarding that identifies skill gaps or even worse, no training in generative AI to bring those new to it up to speed. Ok, enough of my ranting, back to the slop. 🙂 

Consider, for instance, that the number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, while AI use has likewise doubled at work since 2023. Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?

In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, Harvard Research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as AI slop. In the context of work, Harvard refers to this phenomenon as workslop. Harvard Research defines workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.

Here’s how it happens: as AI tools become more accessible, workers can now generate polished-looking outputs with ease—well-formatted slides, lengthy structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and even functional code. While some employees use this capability to refine genuinely strong work, most produce content that looks polished on the surface but is ultimately unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial project context.

The effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of effort downstream. Instead of reducing workload, it forces the recipient to interpret, correct, or even redo the deliverable. In other words, the effort isn’t eliminated—it’s simply transferred from creator to receiver.

Incompetence is already bad enough. I tell everyone I know, the only benefit I receive from all my hard work and competence… is more work. This is one reason why really skilled people love working at startups. You can’t hide behind your incompetence. The only person skilled in your vertical at the company may be you. If you can’t carry your own water the only person that sinks is you.

If you’ve encountered this before, you probably remember the sequence: first confusion as you open the document, then frustration—Wait, what is this exactly?—and finally the creeping suspicion that the sender relied on AI to churn out text instead of thinking it through. If that resonates, congratulations: you’ve been workslopped.

According to our ongoing survey, workslop is a widespread problem. Among 1,150 U.S.-based full-time employees across industries, 40% reported receiving workslop in the past month. On average, those employees estimate that 15.4% of the content they receive at work qualifies as workslop.

The phenomenon happens most often between peers (40%), but it also flows upward—18% of respondents said they’ve received workslop from direct reports. Sixteen percent said it comes from managers to their teams, or even from higher up the chain. While workslop occurs across industries, employees in professional services and technology report being hit the hardest.

Cognitive offloading to machines is hardly new—nor are the anxieties about technology eroding our mental capacities. In 2006, technology journalist Nicolas Carr posed the now-famous question in The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stupid? This concern stretches back much further; even Socrates worried that the written alphabet would weaken memory. The enduring model of cognitive offloading is simple: we hand over demanding mental tasks to tools like Google because it’s easier to search for information than to remember it ourselves.

Unlike this mental outsourcing to a machine, however, workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues.

This used to be difficult for me. When you’re fresh out of college or even when you are the new guy, you don’t want to seem confrontational or arrogant at the start. How do you tell your boss the email he sent you is garbage? Right, no easy answer here.

Here’s a tip. If it’s not that bad, drop the core of the email or text into ChatGPT… etc and type… please polish this up. I know, I’m using the thing that created the mess to fix the mess that might end up making the mess worse. Just a suggestion and it works more often than not.

Workslop may be effortless to create, but it exacts a real toll on the organization. What feels like a shortcut for the sender becomes a pit the recipient must climb out of.

Leaders can counter this by modeling thoughtful, intentional AI use.

• Set clear guardrails for your teams that define norms and acceptable practices.

• Position AI as a collaborative partner—not a shortcut.

• Craft a short training program or course on Prompt Engineering.

• Create a library of examples detailing workslop vs goodslop. 🙂 

And most importantly, hold work produced by human-AI teams to the same standards of excellence as work done by humans alone or by robots alone.

Thanks everyone and have a great day. 👏

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