What Is Workslop and Why It’s a Danger for your Brand

According to an article published in the Harvard Business Review, workslop is “AI-generated work content that appears to be good work but lacks the necessary substance to advance a given task significantly.” In other words, the vast majority of things I receive from artificial intelligence. The article highlights an important issue: the quality of content produced with AI often lacks substance and, more importantly, creates additional work for supervisors. Deliverables may look polished, have length, and be written in proper sentences, but they add no real value to a company’s conversation.

According to BetterUp Labs, workslop could be one of the reasons why 95% of organizations that have tested AI report zero return on that investment. Another study from Stanford’s Social Media Lab found that when employees receive work created with artificial intelligence —or workslop, as it’s commonly called— trust in the colleague who sent it erodes. This may be the first study to measure the loss of trust in a person resulting from the use of artificial intelligence.

The issue becomes even more serious when considering the wave of layoffs in consulting firms, such as Accenture, which announced a reduction of 11,000 jobs, targeting professionals deemed unable to learn artificial intelligence. In other words, you lose if you use it, and you lose if you don’t. The company has invested in training more than half a million of its 700,000 employees in AI tools. It remains to be seen whether this training will make the new talent more valuable than the pre-AI workforce.

Workslop is a massive problem for the marketing community. How many marketing plans do we see that are unrealistic or disconnected from the end consumer? The impact of workslop goes beyond the loss of trust among colleagues: it also undermines the company’s credibility and, in extreme cases, the profession as a whole. According to the BetterUp study, each document considered workslop requires two hours of additional work to untangle or make useful. The same report estimates that American companies waste more than $186 per employee per month processing workslop. For large corporations, the cost is staggering.

In principle, the way to protect against this phenomenon is human supervision; however, this approach contradicts the very concept of artificial intelligence and its application in business. The idea is to use it to automate, achieve greater results in less time, and therefore at lower cost. Yet it has created the opposite problem: the tool requires more supervision, since in many cases the creator is the first to overlook the poor quality of the results.

Proponents of AI tools argue that the problem lies in the prompts—that good instructions yield better results. This is true to a point, but the whirlwind of work and pressure in the labor market creates a perverse incentive: to produce long, complex documents with AI that lack substance and real value for businesses. One of the disadvantages of modern marketing and communication is that they have made the consumer responsible for everything —a kind of transfer of accountability. Think about soft drinks: it’s not the manufacturer’s fault that they’re high in calories; it’s the consumer’s fault for not moderating. The same logic applies to social media: it’s not the algorithm’s fault, it’s the teenager who spends too much time staring at the screen. This is a reality that will be difficult to change.

In the case of artificial intelligence, not all the blame falls on the person writing the prompt; we must also recognize the limitations of the tool. At least for now, we must understand that it can be of great help —but it still cannot replace the value of work well done by a professional.