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What is 'bot sitting' and how much time are workers really wasting on it?
Bot sitting is the time workers spend checking AI outputs, feeding missing context, and debugging errors instead of benefiting from efficiency gains. According to a study of 6,000 workers across the US, the UK, and Australia, 69% of workers now admit to bot sitting—wasting an average of 6.4 hours per week on these tasks.
The term captures a critical gap between AI's promised productivity boost and workplace reality. Workers are not using AI to eliminate work; they're using it to generate content that requires substantial rework and oversight.
This hidden cost of AI adoption is reshaping how organizations measure return on investment. What looks like AI acceleration on paper becomes a different story when workers spend their "saved" time validating, correcting, and contextualizing the tool's output. As discussed in the episode with Ana-Maria Thijssen, this reality hits especially hard for change communications teams managing large-scale transformations where accuracy and tone matter immensely.
The hidden workload behind AI efficiency
Bot sitting reflects a fundamental truth about AI tools: they are fast at generating text, but they are not smart about organizational context. A communications professional using Microsoft Copilot or similar tools may generate a draft in minutes, but that draft still needs fact-checking, tone refinement, and alignment with real organizational circumstances that the AI cannot know.
The 6.4-hour weekly average is not evenly distributed. Knowledge workers, particularly those in roles like change communications, often invest far more time in validation and correction than teams doing routine tasks. Ana-Maria Thijssen, working as the sole communications professional in her organization's global SAP transformation programme, highlighted how AI became her virtual colleague precisely because the tool's output always requires her expert judgment before it can be shared with 6,000 programme users across dozens of locations.
"AI became my virtual colleague. It's not a person that does my job. It's more like an entity that helps me bounce ideas and not feel so alone."
Ana-Maria Thijssen — Change Communications Lead (OCM/CMO team). Thijssen joined her current role approximately a year and a half after her organization's SAP IT transformation programme had already started, meaning she had to onboard rapidly with no formal induction. She works as the sole communications professional embedded within an Organizational Change Management team operating across a global, multi-wave programme spanning dozens of locations worldwide. Her colleagues, involved since January 2015, are a key source of institutional knowledge she leverages alongside AI tools to manage communications for the transformation's 6,000 users.
Bot sitting also reveals why organizations cannot simply hire fewer communicators or assume AI will slash internal communications budgets. The work is not eliminated—it is transformed into oversight, validation, and quality assurance. As explored in Unprompted: Real AI in IC, this shift demands different skills and creates new demands on the professionals who already manage multiple competing priorities.
Key takeaways
- Bot sitting describes time spent checking, debugging, and contextualizing AI output rather than eliminating work altogether—69% of surveyed workers admit to this practice.
- Workers waste an average of 6.4 hours per week on bot-sitting tasks, turning AI's speed advantage into a hidden cost for organizations measuring productivity gains.
- Change communications roles are particularly vulnerable to bot sitting because organizational context, accuracy, and tone cannot be delegated to AI without expert validation.
- AI tools complement human expertise in high-stakes communication roles, but they do not reduce the need for experienced professionals to oversee output quality.
See also
Will AI replace internal communications professionals, according to Ana-Maria Thijssen?
Thijssen is unequivocal that AI will not take communications jobs, arguing that AI lacks the human experience, organisational context, and people-centred skills essential to the role.
What is the emotional value of AI for solo internal communications professionals, according to Ana-Maria Thijssen?
Thijssen identifies emotional support as one of the most significant, if unexpected, benefits of using AI: when working alone, self-doubt and professional isolation are eased by having a virtual colleague to bounce ideas off and validate thinking.
How is Ana-Maria Thijssen's team preparing to scale change communications across 30 locations in the next wave of their SAP programme?
With the next wave covering 30 locations across Europe and America — compared to just three locations in earlier waves — Thijssen's team is focusing on templates, playbooks, and AI-assisted content to ensure consistent messaging at scale.