Workers Spend Half Their Time Babysitting AI Tools

A new study finds "botsitting" AI tools is creating as much work as it saves, challenging the narrative of pure productivity gains.

A new study from researchers at Stanford and UC Santa Barbara reveals a hidden cost to using AI in the workplace. While artificial intelligence tools help eliminate tedious tasks, they also introduce a new category of chores, a phenomenon the study calls "botsitting." This term describes the significant time employees spend prompting, verifying, correcting, and managing the output of AI systems to ensure it is accurate and useful. According to the research, this "botsitting" can consume as much time as the productive work the AI was meant to streamline in the first place. Paul Leonardi, a professor at UC Santa Barbara involved in the study, highlighted that most people don't recognize how much effort they actually spend working on the tools to achieve the professed time savings. This suggests that the efficiency gains from AI are not as straightforward as they appear, as the time saved on old tasks is often reallocated to managing the new technology itself.

This finding has critical implications for founders, CTOs, and business leaders evaluating the return on investment (ROI) for AI technologies. The study's data presents a crucial counter-narrative to the widespread hype around massive, immediate AI-driven productivity boosts. While an individual employee might complete a specific task faster with AI, the overall organizational productivity may not see a net increase if that saved time is simply shifted to managing the AI. This forces a more nuanced approach to measuring AI's true impact. Instead of focusing solely on task completion speed, companies must account for the total cost of ownership, which includes the often-invisible labor of "botsitting." For developers and IT teams, the challenge is to build and deploy AI tools that require less human oversight and are more seamlessly integrated into existing workflows, thereby minimizing this new form of administrative burden and unlocking genuine efficiency gains at a team or company level.