Harvard Business Review warns AI ‘workslop’ is rotting companies from the inside
TL;DR
HBR says companies that went all-in on AI face “knowledge decay” as low-quality outputs pile up, erode trust, and cost $9M a year in rework.
Companies that pushed hardest to adopt generative AI are now contending with a problem the technology was supposed to prevent: their work is getting worse. Two articles published by Harvard Business Review this month describe a feedback loop in which AI-generated low-quality output degrades the information companies rely on to make decisions, a phenomenon the authors call “knowledge decay.”
The June 2026 HBR article, written by Oxford operations management professor Matthias Holweg and Babson College professor Thomas Davenport, argues that the damage goes beyond individual errors. When employees use AI to produce work that looks polished but contains mistakes or lacks substance, colleagues downstream waste time verifying, correcting, or redoing it. As those errors compound across teams and departments, the organisation’s collective...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to thenextweb.com. To see the full text click HERE
