GoKawiilAI is supposed to save workers time. Instead, some employees report spending hours every week cleaning up after it.
A new report from Glean's Work AI Institute, produced with researchers from universities including Notre Dame, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, found that white-collar workers spend an average of 6.4 hours a week "botsitting" AI — feeding it context, checking outputs, debugging mistakes, and cleaning up errors.
The researchers surveyed 6,000 full-time workers in the US, UK, and Australia who primarily work on computers or digital tools between December 2025 and January 2026.
The term "botsitting" was coined by the report's authors to describe the often-overlooked work required to make AI useful.
"Workers now burn an average of 6.4 hours a week botsitting — most of a full working day, every week," the report said.
'Often tedious' and 'exhausting' work
The findings highlight a growing disconnect between individual productivity gains and companywide performance — a productivity paradox many companies are facing, Business Insider's Juliana Kaplan and Jacob Zinkula reported this week in a multi-part series, "The Great Coding Reset."
While 87% of workers surveyed in Glean's report said they use AI at work and 75% said it makes them more productive, only 13% said their organization was performing significantly better because of it.
According to Rebecca Hinds, head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and one of the report's authors, much of the missing productivity is being consumed by work employees never expected to do.
On the "Cognitive Revolution" podcast on Wednesday, Hinds described botsitting as "often tedious," and "exhausting" work that is "not rewarded and it's not appreciated or tracked or measured and certainly not incentivized within the organization."
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