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Image: Getty<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPublished on\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJune 23, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Australian digital workers are spending almost a full day each week \u201cbotsitting\u201d AI, with new research revealing a growing gap between widespread adoption and real productivity gains<\/p>\n
Image: Getty<\/p>\n
Some\u00a090 per cent of digital workers<\/a> in Australia use artificial intelligence to complete work tasks, yet only 10 per cent say the technology has improved organisational performance<\/a>, with workers spending almost a day per week \u201cbotsitting\u201d AI.<\/p>\n The study from Glean\u2019s Work AI Institute<\/a> of 6,000 full-time digital workers across the US, the UK and Australia revealed that roughly four in 10 Australian workers say AI sessions \u201cfail outright\u201d, resulting in \u201ca restart, substantial rework, or a reset back to zero\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Australian workers report spending 6.5 hours a week, almost an entire workday, in \u201cbotsitting\u201d mode. This is defined in the report as feeding AI missing context, checking outputs, debugging mistakes, rerunning prompts and cleaning up wrong answers.<\/p>\n Some 73 per cent of the 1,500 Australian digital workers surveyed have corrected or redone AI-assisted work in the past month, and 30 per cent do it \u201cat least weekly\u201d. Another 45 per cent of Australians say they have delivered AI-generated work they could not fully explain.<\/p>\n Babysitting the bot<\/p>\n Work Futurist and Work AI Institute expert, Dom Price, says many of us use AI as if it\u2019s an out-of-the-box software solution, when it\u2019s \u201cbasically a dummy\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we\u2019re having to babysit (AI) for six and a half hours to make sure it does the right thing, you\u2019re probably using it for the wrong thing,\u201d he tells Forbes Australia. \u201cIf something used to take me seven hours and now it takes me half an hour, but I then spend the other six and a half hours looking after the bot, I\u2019ve saved no actual time.\u201d<\/p>\n The survey also found that 77 per cent of Australian AI users admit to at least one unchecked AI-output behaviour, compared with 64 per cent of Americans.\u00a0<\/p>\n Furthermore, despite Australia\u2019s high uptake of AI among digital workers \u2013 those defined as full-time employees who complete most of their work on computers or online tools \u2013\u00a0\u00a0some 56 per cent say important information they need to do their job is not connected to or accessible through AI tools.<\/p>\n The productivity gap<\/p>\n The study also revealed the disconnect between the personal and company-wide impact of AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n While some 72 per cent of Australian AI users concede that the technology makes them more productive overall, only 10 per cent say AI has significantly improved \u201corganisational performance\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAustralia has always been good at moving quickly and making new technologies work in practical ways,\u201d\u00a0says Price. \u201cBut AI is different because it doesn\u2019t just ask organisations to adopt another tool \u2013 it asks them to change how work gets done.\u00a0Right now, too many companies are trying to push AI-speed change through legacy-speed systems.\u201d<\/p>\n Many organisations are rolling out AI to individuals rather than redesigning work at the team level, Price adds. This results in organisations using AI to speed up inefficient systems.<\/p>\n \u201cThey say, \u2018We have this terrible process that we\u2019ve never liked. Let\u2019s put AI all over it and let\u2019s do it faster\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cMy advice is: Don\u2019t do the stupid thing faster. Instead, stop doing the stupid thing. Find a better way of doing it and then use AI as the accelerant.\u201d<\/p>\n Workers feeling dismayed<\/p>\n Perhaps unsurprisingly, 43 per cent of Australian digital workers surveyed also say they feel worn out by AI tools<\/a>, compared with 33 per cent in the US.\u00a0<\/p>\n Furthermore, the problem of \u201cbotsitting\u201d may have significant downstream effects, causing some employees to look for another job.<\/p>\n Frequent \u201cbotsitters\u201d in Australia are 59 per cent more likely to be actively looking for another job, while workers who admit to shipping unchecked AI-generated work are 3.4 times more likely to be actively job-hunting.\u00a0<\/p>\n These statistics are unsurprising to Price. \u201cPeople get purpose and a sense of wellbeing from work,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to be spending eight or nine hours a day staring at a machine doing my job half as well as me, so I can then correct it and send out the output. If your job is the orchestrator and overseer of the bot, well, that will naturally sound quite miserable to you.\u201d<\/p>\n Want to see more Forbes articles on your feed?\u00a0Tap here to make Forbes Australia a preferred source on Google.<\/a><\/p>\n Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world.\u00a0Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0become a member here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published on June 23, 2026 Australian digital workers are spending almost a full day each week \u201cbotsitting\u201d AI,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":755208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,1474,3324,105,4849],"class_list":["post-755207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-innovation","tag-productivity","tag-technology","tag-working"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/755208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}