June 11, 2026
Ctrl+Alt+Delusion
Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
AI was meant to save time, but workers say they’re stuck babysitting broken bot messes
TLDR: Workers say AI isn’t saving time so much as creating nearly a full extra day each week of checking and fixing its work. In the comments, some called that modern drudgery, while others blasted the real problem: coworkers sending around sloppy AI-made junk and expecting everyone else to clean it up.
The dream was simple: let artificial intelligence do the boring stuff while humans breeze through work. The reality, according to a new Business Insider report on research from Glean’s Work AI Institute, is a lot less glamorous. White-collar workers say they spend 6.4 hours a week “botsitting” — basically babysitting AI by feeding it details, checking its work, fixing its mistakes, and cleaning up the mess after it confidently gets things wrong. Even worse? The workers doing the most of this cleanup are far more likely to be job-hunting.
And the comment section was not in a forgiving mood. One camp shrugged and said, basically, isn’t this just the new factory line? Another was far angrier, saying the real insult isn’t using AI — it’s being forced to wade through the “unverified slop” coworkers now fling at them. That sparked the biggest mood of the thread: disappointment. Not just in the tools, but in the people using them badly.
There was also a wonderfully bitter running joke: AI is sold as a magical productivity machine, yet workers keep describing the same experience — telling the bot exactly what to do, then fixing the nonsense anyway. One commenter deadpanned that those “massive productivity gains” they keep hearing about are, well, something they’ve merely been told before. Ouch. The vibe was clear: if AI is the future of work, a lot of workers think the future currently looks like unpaid janitorial duty for a very confident robot.
Key Points
- •Glean’s Work AI Institute report found that surveyed white-collar workers spend an average of 6.4 hours per week “botsitting” AI systems.
- •The study surveyed 6,000 full-time workers in the US, UK, and Australia between December 2025 and January 2026.
- •While 87% of respondents said they use AI at work and 75% said it improves their productivity, only 13% said their organization was performing significantly better because of it.
- •Workers who spend an unusually large share of their AI time botsitting were reported to be 73% more likely to be actively looking for another job.
- •The article says companies seeing stronger AI gains are investing in context-setting, training, judgment, and clearer standards rather than simply deploying more AI tools.