Ensure Your Team Isn’t Wasting Time “Botsitting” by HBR
Many organizations are dealing with a new, invisible tax on
employees’ time: botsitting. This is the untracked, unrewarded work of
repeatedly checking, correcting, and stabilizing an AI system before its output
can be used. As a leader, you need to account for this labor to protect your
team’s time and mental energy. Here’s where to start.
Identify when botsitting is
necessary. Not all oversight is wasteful; some of it provides
the accountability AI-assisted work requires, such as reviewing
AI-generated material before it reaches a customer. Protect this work and build
it into your team’s workflows.
Create clear metrics. Track
how often AI-generated work needs human review, how many prompt attempts it
takes to get a usable result, and how much time employees spend verifying
answers or transferring context across tools.
Build psychological safety. If you reward token counts and login streaks, employees may quietly stop flagging bad outputs. Make it safe for people to say “this isn’t working” without fear of appearing resistant to adoption
https://hbr.org/2026/08/how-much-time-do-your-employees-spend-botsitting
