AI Isn’t Breaking Work. It’s Already Broken.

The Financial Times ​recently reported​ an interview with Rebecca Hinds, head of the Work AI Institute. Hinds was discussing a new survey of 6,000 digital workers, which included the following arresting statistic: although respondents claimed that AI saved them 11 hours a week on average, only 13% reported any improvement in company performance. Hinds offers three explanations for this paradoxical result: When calculating the 11 hours saved, workers aren’t counting all of the time they spend waiting for AI agents to complete tasks (an activity some are now calling “botsitting”). The workers often ignore the cost of toggling between multiple AI tools as they attempt to get a usable response (60% of the sample reported running queries across several tools in search of better outputs). Workers may also be participating in what Hinds calls “workplace theater,” in which they are “visibly performing work for bosses and colleagues, rather than focusing on the actual grind of getting things…