FOURWEEKMBA EXPLAINER · FROM THE NEWSROOM · UPDATED 13 NOVEMBER 2026
The short answer: Workslop is AI-generated work that looks finished but is not: a polished memo, deck, email or summary that lacks the substance to move the task forward, so the person who receives it has to decode, check or redo it. The effort does not disappear; it moves from the sender to the reader. Researchers at BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab coined the term in September 2025. In their survey of 1,150 US full-time workers, 40% had received workslop in the past month, each case took an average of 1 hour 56 minutes to deal with, and 42% of recipients came to see the sender as less trustworthy. Their research points to the conditions, unclear AI mandates and overloaded teams, more than to lazy individuals.
Free to share with a link to this page. Figures from BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab, published in Harvard Business Review on 22 September 2025.
The researchers define workslop as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” BetterUp’s own summary is shorter: “Workslop is AI-generated content that looks good, but lacks substance.”
The key is not that AI was used. It is where the work ends up. AI makes it easy to produce well-formatted slides, long structured reports and articulate summaries in seconds. Used well, that polishes good work. Used badly, it produces output that is “unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context”, and the reader has to “interpret, correct, or redo the work.” In the authors’ words: “it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.”
That is what separates workslop from ordinary sloppy work. Most technology lets a person offload thinking to a machine. Workslop, the authors write, “uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being.”
Where the term comes from
“Workslop” adapts “AI slop”, the name for low-quality AI-generated posts that fill social media feeds. Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano and Jeffrey T. Hancock introduced it in “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity”, Harvard Business Review, 22 September 2025. The research is a collaboration between BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab. A follow-up, “Why People Create AI ‘Workslop’ — and How to Stop It”, appeared in HBR on 16 January 2026.
What workslop costs
The figures come from the researchers’ survey of 1,150 US full-time workers, run in September 2025:
How common: 40% had received workslop in the last month. Those who had received it estimated that 15.4% of the content they get at work qualifies.
Time: an average of 1 hour 56 minutes spent dealing with each instance.
Money: about $186 per employee per month, by the researchers’ estimate from time spent and self-reported salaries. For a 10,000-person organisation, at their 41% prevalence estimate, that is over $9 million a year in lost productivity.
Feelings: 53% of recipients were annoyed, 38% confused and 22% offended.
Trust: about half saw the sender as less creative, capable and reliable; 42% as less trustworthy and 37% as less intelligent. 34% told teammates or managers, and 32% were less likely to want to work with the sender again.
The researchers found professional services and technology “disproportionately impacted”.
It moves in every direction. Most of it travels between peers (40%), but 18% goes from direct reports up to managers and 16% flows down from managers to their teams.
Why it happens
The follow-up research is blunt: “The proliferation of workslop is a management failure.” Two pressures meet.
From the top, vague mandates. 41% of employees in the survey said leadership encouraged them to use AI without detailed instructions or the context needed to apply it to their own work. When AI use itself is the target, people use it to show compliance. The first article puts it simply: “Indiscriminate imperatives yield indiscriminate usage.”
From below, overload. 53% of respondents admitted sending AI-generated work that was unhelpful, low effort or low quality at least some of the time, and one in 10 said it was half or more of what they sent. The main reason they gave was feeling stretched too thin.
That is why Niederhoffer told Business Insider in November 2026: “Workslop is predicted by the conditions more than it is in individual behavior.”
What companies did: five sets of rules
Business Insider reported on 5 November 2026 how five companies responded. Our newsroom report covered it the same day.
Company
What happened
The rule
Twill (tech recruiting; CEO Michelle Volberg)
After an enterprise Claude rollout to the 10-person company, staff sent Slack messages and emails pasted from Claude, some with hallucinations. She emailed staff: “Please stop talking to me like a robot.”
Use AI to brainstorm and work through ideas; use your own voice for internal communications. “If you wouldn’t say it that way in person, email, or Slack — don’t send it.”
Clay (software; cofounder Varun Anand)
Posted a new AI writing policy on LinkedIn in August
Not a ban on AI. Writers must stand behind every idea in every sentence, and creating a document should take longer than reading it.
Spellbook (CEO Scott Stevenson)
Told his team in early September
Five scrappy bullet points beat five perfectly formatted pages; communication with customers should always be “hand-written.”
Zocdoc
Issued guidance in August
“never ship your slop”; be transparent about bot-to-human interaction; keep original ideation. Chief communications officer Jessica Aptman called it “less punitive” and more prescriptive.
FischTank PR (CEO Eric Fischgrund)
Fired one worker last year who kept using AI for off-limits work: a confrontation the first time, a warning the second, then a third offence
No AI-written content to reporters or clients, checked with an AI detector.
Source: Business Insider (Amanda Hoover), 5 November 2026. “The five companies” is our count of those it names.
The pattern: none of the five bans AI outright. They draw the line where work changes hands, at what goes to a boss, a colleague, a customer or a reporter.
How teams prevent workslop
Replace “use AI everywhere” with specific guidance. Say which tasks AI suits, which it does not, and what good output looks like for your team.
Set the rule at the hand-off. Like Clay and Twill: the sender stands behind every sentence, and internal messages sound like the person who sent them.
Build skill, not just access. People with a sense of competence and control over AI tools were half as likely to create workslop, the researchers found.
Make it safe to talk about AI use. Trust in the team reduced workslop by 61% in their data: people who can admit using AI and ask for feedback produce better work.
Keep human review where it matters. The follow-up asks for “explicit review processes that reinforce, not offload, human judgment.” The first article asks leaders to hold work done by “bionic human-AI duos” to the same standards as work done by humans alone.
Read workslop as a signal. Feeling stretched too thin was the main reason senders gave. “Each instance of workslop is a signal of an organization under strain,” the researchers write, so look at workloads, not only at the sender.
FAQ
What is workslop?
AI-generated work content that looks polished but lacks the substance to move a task forward, so the person receiving it has to interpret, fix or redo it.
Who coined the term workslop?
Researchers at BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab, in an article by Kate Niederhoffer, Jeffrey T. Hancock and four co-authors published in Harvard Business Review on 22 September 2025.
How common is workslop?
In their survey of 1,150 US full-time workers, 40% had received workslop in the past month, and 53% admitted sending low-quality AI-generated work at least some of the time.
How much does workslop cost?
An average of 1 hour 56 minutes per instance and about $186 per employee per month, the researchers estimate: over $9 million a year for a 10,000-person company.
What is the difference between workslop and AI slop?
AI slop is low-quality AI-generated content on social media. Workslop is the workplace version: it lands on a colleague, who has to do the work the sender skipped.
Should companies ban AI to stop workslop?
Most of the companies Business Insider described did not. Clay’s policy is explicitly not a ban and Twill allows AI for brainstorming. The researchers point to clear guidance, AI skills and team trust as the factors that reduce it.
Sources: Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity”, Harvard Business Review, 22 September 2025; “Why People Create AI ‘Workslop’ — and How to Stop It”, Harvard Business Review, 16 January 2026; BetterUp Labs, betterup.com/workslop; Business Insider (Amanda Hoover), 5 November 2026; FourWeekMBA newsroom report linked above. Survey figures are as the researchers report them; the article does not give margins of error. Quotes are verbatim from the sources named.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
