UK businesses spend £11.7 billion on 'AI slop' corrections every year, with 1 out of every 4 hours wasted

Who will win the AI race?.

• Most IT leaders worry workers now spend too much time reviewing and revising AI noise and errors
• Layering AI on top of unsuitable tech stacks and fragmented data is the biggest cause
• Business leaders expect returns soon, IT leaders feel responsible to deliver ROI

Four in five global mid-market IT leaders report that AI outputs introduce noise or errors into their work that cause them to have to spend time correcting content, ultimately negating many of the productivity benefits associated with the tech.

Instead of reducing manual tasks, as many as 86% of leaders say that managing AI complexity has actually increased their team's workload, with employees stuck in a loop of reviewing, revising and regenerating.

Per the Freshworks report, IT teams lose around a quarter (26%) of their time to troubleshooting and complexity management.

AI productivity is being offset by noise, errors

Freshworks revealed that UK mid-market companies now spend £11.7 billion annually on so-called 'complexity tax', with companies losing an average of 25% of their AI budget to complexity overhead.

According to the report, poor strategies aren't to blame for the issues, but rather an attempt to layer modern AI tools on top of legacy and fragmented tech stacks. Additionally, only one in three of the companies surveyed had a formal, consistently-applied AI governance framework.

As a result, IT leaders are less likely to be optimistic about ROI while as many as three-quarters (72%) of general business leaders and execs expect to see a return within eight months. IT leaders are feeling the pressure more than ever as four-fifths (81%) worry their career progression could be at risk if they can't prove measurable ROI within the next year to two.

At this point, companies are so deep into complex tech stacks that solutions can vary. Freshworks advises companies to resolve the AI context problem by ensuring data quality and fragmentation are addressed.

"The companies that move from purchase to performance fastest will turn AI from a complexity tax into a competitive advantage," Chief Product Officer Srinivasan Raghavan explained.