AI Is Creating More Work Than It Removes
New research suggests that while AI is helping employees work faster, many businesses are creating a new layer of digital busywork that is eroding much of the productivity they hoped to gain.
The Rise Of The Copy And Paste Economy
Artificial intelligence is often presented as a tool that removes repetitive work, eliminates inefficiency and gives employees more time to focus on higher-value tasks.
However, according to new research from Workday, many organisations are discovering that AI can create new forms of work as well as eliminate existing ones. The company’s study of 2,400 UK professionals found that employees are increasingly spending large parts of their day moving information between disconnected systems, checking outputs and acting as the link between AI tools that do not naturally work together.
The result is what Workday calls the “copy/paste economy”, a workplace where workers spend significant amounts of time transferring information between applications rather than focusing on the work those applications are supposed to support.
According to the research, as many as one in four UK employees reported spending more than seven hours each week moving information between systems and reconciling data. More than eight in ten said they spend significant time coordinating work between teams, moving information between platforms or resolving conflicting data from different systems.
Employees Like AI More Than Many Assume
One of the most surprising findings in the report is that employees are not rejecting AI. In fact, the vast majority appear to be positive about both their jobs and the technology itself. Workday found that 97 per cent of UK employees rate their day-to-day work positively, while 81 per cent said AI has improved their work experience. More than half said AI has reduced task completion times, and 45 per cent reported that it has accelerated their work in a productive way.
Those findings seem to challenge the popular narrative that workers are resisting AI adoption. Instead, the research suggests that many employees are eager for AI to help them work more effectively. The problem is not the technology itself, but how organisations are deploying it.
When Faster Tasks Don’t Create Faster Work
Many businesses have introduced AI tools to help employees write documents, summarise information, answer questions or generate content.
Those capabilities can certainly save time on individual tasks, but the challenge is that work rarely consists of isolated tasks.
For example, information often needs to move between departments, applications, approval processes and business systems before a job is complete. If employees still need to manually transfer data between those systems, much of the productivity benefit can disappear.
As one IT director quoted in the report explained: “Dealing with system glitches, chasing approvals and constantly fixing or redoing work because of inconsistent data, it keeps me busy, but doesn’t feel like real progress.”
That distinction between activity and progress is central to the findings. Employees may be working hard, but much of their effort is spent compensating for fragmented systems rather than creating value.
The Human Middleware Problem
Workday’s report uses a particularly revealing phrase to describe what is happening. Many employees have effectively become “the glue” holding disconnected systems together. Rather than technology handling the flow of information automatically, workers are manually transferring data, reconciling inconsistencies and coordinating between applications. This is increasingly becoming one of the hidden costs of AI adoption.
Businesses may deploy multiple AI tools across different departments, but if those systems cannot share information effectively, employees become the human middleware connecting everything together.
One construction industry director quoted in the report described the impact of this fragmentation, saying: “My day often feels busy but not genuinely productive when I’m pulled into constant coordination tasks and system-related issues that interrupt focused, high-value work.”
The irony is that many organisations have invested in AI to reduce administrative work, only to create new administrative burdens elsewhere.
Why Embedded AI Performs Better
The research also points towards a solution. Only 23 per cent of UK organisations have deeply embedded AI into their core business systems and workflows. Most have instead added AI around the edges of existing processes.
According to the report, employees are already showing organisations how they want AI to work: “integrated directly into workflows, proactively surfacing insights and handling coordination in the background.” The difference appears quite significant.
For example, among organisations with AI integrated into core systems, 57 per cent of employees reported task reductions of 25 per cent or more. Where AI was not embedded into core systems, that figure fell to 39 per cent.
Workday argues that the most successful organisations are moving beyond task-oriented AI and towards workflow-oriented AI. Instead of simply drafting content or answering questions, AI becomes part of the process itself by monitoring activity, routing approvals, surfacing insights and coordinating work in the background.
This mirrors a wider trend emerging across the technology industry. Google’s Gemini Spark, Microsoft’s Copilot agents, OpenAI’s growing agent capabilities and Anthropic’s workflow automation initiatives all point towards a future where AI handles increasingly complex coordination tasks rather than individual requests.
What Does This Mean For Your Business?
The Workday research suggests many organisations may really be asking the wrong question about AI. Instead of focusing on whether a particular tool can save five minutes on a specific task, leaders may need to ask whether the overall process requires fewer steps. If employees are still copying information between systems, reconciling conflicting data and manually connecting workflows, the organisation may be automating tasks without truly improving productivity.
Perhaps the most important finding in the report is that employees appear ready for a different approach. As Workday concludes, employees increasingly expect AI to be “embedded, intelligent and invisible in the flow of work”, adding that “The new work day is not AI assisting with existing work, but work redesigned around what AI and humans each do best.”
That may prove to be one of the most important lessons of the AI era. The biggest gains are unlikely to come from adding more AI tools. They are more likely to come from redesigning how work flows through the organisation in the first place.
