Workers are spending hours fixing AI mistakes
A Workday survey found AI saves time on paper — but much of it disappears as employees clean up hallucinations and errors
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Artificial intelligence is saving workers time, but a large share of those gains is being erased by the effort required to fix AI-generated mistakes, according to a new study.
The report by Workday $WDAY, based on a November survey of 3,200 employees across North America, Europe, and Asia, found that 85% of respondents said AI saved them between one and seven hours a week. However, Workday said roughly 37% of that time is lost to “correcting, clarifying, or rewriting low-quality AI-generated content,” creating what the company described as an “AI tax on productivity.”
Related Content
“For every 10 hours of efficiency gained through AI, nearly four hours are lost to fixing its output,” the report said. As a result, “productivity gains alone are not translating into better outcomes for most organizations,” it said.
Only 14% of employees surveyed said they “consistently achieve net-positive outcomes from AI use,” according to the study. The burden is not evenly distributed, with the most frequent AI users often spending the most time reviewing and correcting its output. Highly engaged employees lose an average of about 1.5 weeks a year to rework, Workday found.
“There is a big productivity paradox,” Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product at Workday, told Axios.
The report said the problem is structural rather than behavioral. AI has been “layered onto roles that were never updated to accommodate it,” forcing employees to reconcile faster output with unchanged expectations around accuracy and accountability. Nearly 9 in 10 organizations said fewer than half of their roles have been updated to include AI-related skills.
The study also found a disconnect between leadership priorities and employee experience. While 66% of leaders cited skills training as a top investment priority, only 37% of employees most exposed to AI-related rework said they had increased access to training.
Workday said organizations seeing sustained gains from AI are those that reinvest productivity savings into workforce development and clearer role design. “Paying a high tax on AI efficiency is not inevitable,” the report said. “It is the cost of implementing AI without investing in the humans who use it.”