CIO AI
2026-06-26 22:01 UTC
Score 49.0
USR-0125-20260626-global-ai-ne-0c46f390
Full article
One of AI’s biggest selling points is all the high-value tasks employees will be free to accomplish with the time saved using AI. Reality, however, remains far from that. While IT workers and other employees do save several hours each week thanks to AI, more than half of that time is burned up babysitting the technology, a new study reveals. According to a survey from the Work AI Institute , digital workers save an average of 11 hours a week through AI, but the net time savings is much less, because they spend 6.4 hours a week “botsitting.” Botsitting involves activities such as feeding AI tools missing context, checking AI outputs, debugging AI mistakes , rerunning prompts, and cleaning up the confident-but-wrong answers they leave behind, as defined by the Work AI Institute, a research group founded by AI copilot and search provider Glean. The botsitting problem is real, several IT leaders agree, and it has serious implications for IT organizations. In many cases, organizations aren’t training their employees to effectively use AI, says Tal Carmi , CIO at digital adoption platform provider WalkMe. WalkMe’s 2026 State of Digital Adoption report found similar results, with employees losing nearly eight hours a week to botsitting, Carmi notes. At the same time, most employees use AI for shallow tasks like writing emails because they don’t trust it for more complex activities, WalkMe found. As a result, enterprises aren’t getting the full ROI of their AI purchases, Carmi says,…