87% of Workers Use AI but Lose 6.4 Hours a Week Managing It, New Report Finds

My take: 87% of digital workers now use AI at work, and 75% say it makes them more productive. But the Work AI Index 2026, a report from the Work AI Institute drawing on data from 6,000 workers across the US, UK, and Australia, surfaces something worth paying attention to: the time you save with AI, you recover managing it. Workers spend an average of 6.4 hours per week on what the study calls "botsitting": reviewing, correcting, re-running, and cleaning up the errors AI leaves behind. That is nearly a full working day, every week, spent on maintenance alone.

The other notable finding: 69% of AI users admit to having sent AI-generated work they did not fully review, did not completely understand, or could not confidently defend if questioned. The report calls this "botshitting." Not a moral judgment; just an operational problem: the time someone saves by sending that unverified work is exactly the time someone else spends fixing it.

If you are an employee, freelancer, or business owner: do you have clear verification processes for the work you produce with AI, or are you assuming the model gets it right by default?