From Workslop to Workshop

In the rush to embrace AI, we've turned it into the ultimate productivity theatre. Reports materialise in minutes, slide decks assemble themselves, emails arrive perfectly phrased with those telltale Oxford commas. Everything looks professional until someone tries to use it and then the facts don't hold up, the logic dissolves, the ideas collapse under the weight of their own polish.

There's a name for this now. Workslop. The growing flood of AI-generated output that looks like work, sounds like work, but adds nothing of value.

According to researchers at Stanford and BetterUp, it already accounts for around 15% of work in most organisations (we think it's much more than that), costing time, money and trust as businesses begin drown in nonsense.

The real issue isn't technological, it's behavioural. As Cassie Kozyrkov wrote in Harvard Business Review, workslop is "thoughtlessness enabled by AI". When we can skip the hardest part of work, the actual thinking, our instincts tell us to do exactly that. And when everyone's doing it, we get thoughtlessness at scale.

Good friction

AI has quietly stripped away something we didn't realise we needed - friction. The conversations, the disagreements, the questioning. All the messy (and frankly enjoyable) human stuff that forced us to make sense before we spoke.

Without it, we just get cognitive pollution. Why? Because we've treated AI like a vending machine for answers instead of a tool for better thinking.

So what's the fix?

Not another layer of software. An older, simpler idea, proper collaboration. The workshop.

Workshops have always been places where people slow down to think together to question, debate and connect ideas until they actually make sense. Now, with AI-enabled workshops on platforms like Miro we can have the best of both worlds.

Quiet correction

Workslop happens when organisations confuse output with outcome. When they chase more instead of better.

But the companies that thrive in the age of AI won't be the ones generating the most words. They'll be the ones generating the most sense.

The workshop is a key component of how we get there. A space where AI makes it easier to start the conversation, not finish it.

That's exactly what we're building at Jointly.

A place where teams use AI not to avoid the hard work of thinking, but to think better, together. More workshop. Less workslop.