Botsitting: The Work Draining AI Gains

Today on the AI Daily Brief, we're talking about bot sitting and the hidden labor that comes with the AI transformation of work. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors KPMG, Superintelligent, MissionCloud, and OutSystems. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you wanna learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. Two other quick notes. First of all, check out trading.bsuper.ai for the newly updated enterprise grade versions of the executive catch up and the executive agent leadership program. The executive agent leadership program is a six week intensive that kicks off on Monday, so last chance to get in on that. And finally, just to let you know, I am recording this a couple days early because of some end of the school year travel. So this will be a main only episode, but we will be back with our normal format on Monday. Today, we're talking about a new report from Glean and the Work AI Institute that's part of their WorkAI index for 2026, and it's all about something called bot sitting or the hidden human labor of AI at work. Now one of the things that you may or may not have noticed this year is that I've done a little bit less coverage of studies from, for example, consulting firms or enterprise focused research houses, and there is an actual specific reason for that. There's actually a couple of reasons, but they all come back to my feeling that the paradigm has shifted so much between non agentic and agentic work that anything that's interacting with non agentic work is largely irrelevant. Now, of course, if you are an enterprise AI leader, that's not the case. There are still lots of use cases that are non agentic that are going to be valuable and productivity enhancing. But you guys know that I have a very strong bias towards being interested in opportunity AI, not just efficiency AI, and the big changes that I see happening in terms of how we work, not just doing the same stuff we've always done a little bit faster. This report, however, starts to get into and name some new types of work that surround AI and agents that I think is really valuable to call out and start to explore. So that's what we're going to get into. Now let's start with the statistics that they use to set everything up. Their big banner, tweet worthy statistics are that 87% of digital workers now use AI at work with 75% saying it makes them more productive, saving them 11 per week through automation. Yet only 13% say their organization is performing significantly better as a result. And these numbers are almost a perfect …