Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!
Today my guest is Rebecca Hinds, author of the bestseller "Your Best Meeting Ever" and Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, which has just published the new Work AI Index 2026 report, which draws on a survey of 6,000 digital workers to describe the state of AI as it's used and experienced by employees at companies that are operating well outside the bubble.
The headline numbers are genuinely strange. 87% of workers now use AI, 73% say it makes them more productive, and on average they report saving 13 hours per week—a third of a work week. And yet only 13% say their organization is performing significantly better as a result.
The report contributes two new terms to the AI discourse: "botsitting" and "botshitting."
Botsitting is all the unglamorous, untracked labor required to make AI useful—feeding it context, debugging its outputs, cleaning up its messes—which the report finds consumes 6.4 hours per week, or roughly half of all the time AI supposedly saves.
For those who are being asked to automate parts of their work that they'd rather do themselves – such as a customer representative who enjoys talking to people but is now being asked to supervise agents, this can be especially painful.
Such alienation predicts both reduced engagement and increased turnover, and helps explain botshitting, which is when people deliver AI-generated work that they can't explain or defend. In the extreme, business becomes farce: a perpetual motion machine of AI slop. Shockingly, in the survey, 69% admit to doing it – a number that reflects both the incredible progress that AIs have made, and perhaps the amount of bullshit work people are asked to do.
Obviously one part of the solution is more integrated AI systems which have the context they need. My experience with my own "Deep Context" system is that it's dramatically reduced my own time spent botsitting, and we discuss how Glean's Enterprise Graph product is playing a similar role for Enterprises.
Beyond that, we also consider what organizations can do to create a more functional AI culture, including how to use AI detection to protect the business without discouraging positive use, rewarding people monetarily for effectively collaborating on AI solutions, and perhaps most powerfully, aligning work to a meaningful shared mission.
My mission with this show, as you may know, is mostly to learn and help others learn as much as possible, but lately I’ve also been trying to entertain and delight you with original songs, made with Suno, which we’re playing at the end of each episode. I’ve really enjoyed the comments people have sent about these, and I encourage you to stay tuned at the end of today’s episode for a legitimately catchy tune with some outstanding, poignant AI written lyrics. It did require quite a bit of botsitting to get it just right, but I really do enjoy the final product and hope you do too.
With that, I hope you enjoy this grounding look at AI as it's practiced in large-scale organizations throughout the English-speaking world, with Rebecca Hinds, Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz