AI Saves Work Hours by Creating More Work; Humans Demand Medals

KEY POINTS

•The November 2025 Workday survey included 3,200 AI-using employees from $100M+ companies across three continents.
•Workers reported saving 1-7 hours a week, but 37% of saved time vanished due to rechecking AI errors.
•AlixPartners CEO said 95% of executives plan AI layoffs, though real productivity gains haven’t materialized yet.

A Workday survey from November 2025 of 3,200 employees—including half bosses—from $100M+ companies in North America, Europe, and Asia reveals that AI is that friend who ‘helps’ by messing up your homework. Though 85% say AI saves them 1-7 hours weekly, 37% of that time vanishes in 'rework': fixing AI’s drafts, which succeed about as often as a pen without ink, given only 14% report consistently positive results. Workday’s Gerrit Kazmaier called it a 'big productivity paradox,' where power users spend more time double-checking prompt rewrites than actual work. Meanwhile, CEOs giddy about layoffs wave AI as a magic wand, though 95% admit it’s mostly an excuse for pink slips, per AlixPartners co-CEO Rob Hornby. Bonus irony: AI coded an Anthropic tool to automate office tasks in 1.5 weeks—entirely AI-written code! Yet humans still face the classic tech adoption riff from dial-up to TikTok: inconvenient, time-consuming, but inevitable.