Workslop Is Dragging Enterprise AI Into a Productivity Trap

AI-generated "workslop" — output that looks competent but fails on inspection — is now documented as a structural drag on enterprise productivity. The problem is not that models are bad; it is that mandated adoption outran the human infrastructure needed to review their outputs.

The New Office Pollution

In September 2025, a team of researchers led by Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, and Jeffrey T. Hancock published a paper in Harvard Business Review that gave a name to something millions of knowledge workers had already felt but could not articulate. They called it "workslop": AI-generated output that is technically plausible, structurally sound, and superficially competent, but wrong in the ways that matter. (Source: Harvard Business Review)

The term spread fast. Fortune picked it up the following day. QZ ran its own treatment on September 24 under the headline "'You've been workslopped': Study warns AI is wasting workers' time." The Guardian followed in October. (Source: Fortune, QZ, The Guardian)