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, and emails arrive perfectly phrased, complete with those telltale Oxford commas. Everything looks professional until someone tries to use it.

That's when the illusion shatters.

Facts don't hold up. Logic dissolves. 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, workslop already accounts for around 15% of workplace output, costing us time, money and trust as we scramble to make it all make sense.

The real issue isn't technological it's behavioral. 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 end up with thoughtlessness at scale.

The friction problem

AI has quietly stripped away the friction that used to make ideas stronger. 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 discipline. The workshop.

From workslop to workshop

The antidote to workslop isn't more AI. It's better use of AI.

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

Here, AI doesn't do the thinking for us. It prompts us. To think better. It sparks discussion. It visualises connections we might miss. It challenges us to go further instead of letting us settle for the first answer that sounds awfully clever.

The 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, but to improve it.

Where technology prompts better thinking, not more noise.

Where collaboration gets its edge back.

Less workslop. More workshop.

More thinking that actually means something because you do it - jointly.