AI is saving you 11 hours but costing you 6 just to babysit the Glean bot
Turns out the AI revolution is just glorified middle management. A new report shows that while Glean and similar tools claim to save time, humans are burning nearly as much energy just fixing bot-induced messes as they save from the actual automation.
A massive study spanning the US, UK, and Australia reveals that while workers claim an 11-hour weekly productivity boost from AI, they are simultaneously hemorrhaging over six hours weekly just babysitting bots. Scientists from Stanford and UC Berkeley found that for every hour of useful output, employees spend roughly another hour cleaning up hallucinations, checking facts, and chasing down the implicit data the machine missed.
The data from Glean Work AI users suggests that only 13% of companies are seeing actual business growth from this tech. Most teams are stuck in a loop where 37% of their AI-related time is spent managing agents, while only 36% goes toward actual productive output. Paul Leonardi notes that we’ve accidentally turned coders and analysts into AI managers, forcing them to spend their time debugging code they didn't even write in the first place.
This isn't a tech upgrade; it's an unpaid internship for your own computer. If the goal was to automate the drudgery, the industry has clearly pivoted to automating the creation of more drudgery for everyone else to fix.
Source: Glean
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