AI Debt Poses Multiple Issues for Businesses
When these agents are used incorrectly, AI debt can build up, the effects of which can be troublesome for businesses. According to Mark Hoffman, an expert at Asana’s Work Innovation Lab: “Those costs could be money costs. They could also be lost time, which relates to money. It could also be a lot of things that you have to undo, which is costly from a financial standpoint.”
Ultimately, debt can have a domino effect on cybersecurity, quality of work, and employee morale, as the existing workforce bears the brunt of mistakes made by autonomous AI agents. With 90% of software developers now using AI to go about their day-to-day operations at work, this could mean broken platforms and lost revenue, among other things.
According to research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab, so-called “workslop” — defined as AI-generated content that has no substance — is creating an extra two hours of work per week for individuals who are tasked with undoing it. This could fetch up to $9 million in lost productivity per year.