What happened in this episode?
In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, host Nathan Labenz speaks with Rebecca Hines, head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and author of the new Work AI Index 2026 report. The report surveyed 6,000 knowledge workers across the US, UK, and Australia to capture how AI is actually being used in enterprises far outside the AI bubble. The headline findings reveal a paradox: 87% of workers now use AI, 73% report productivity gains, and they claim to save an average of 13 hours per week. Yet only 13% say their organizations are performing significantly better as a result. Hines introduces two new terms to explain the gap. Bot sitting describes the hidden labor of feeding AI context, debugging outputs, and cleaning up mistakes, which consumes 6.4 hours weekly—roughly half the reported time savings. Bot shitting refers to workers shipping AI-generated work they cannot explain or defend, with 69% admitting to this behavior. The report draws on both survey data and aggregated Glean platform telemetry showing 36% of AI sessions fail outright. Hines argues the root causes include lack of organizational AI strategy, context-poor tools that don't integrate, and perverse incentives like rewarding token consumption. Workers most threatened by AI are paradoxically automating meaningful work they'd prefer to keep, driving burnout and turnover. The conversation explores solutions including enterprise context graphs that connect all organizational data, measuring and rewarding collaborative AI use rather than individual clicks, aligning work to meaningful mission, and using AI detection thoughtfully to identify both top performers worth retaining and low performers gaming the system. Hines emphasizes this is fundamentally a human change management challenge, not just a technology rollout, and that organizations must be intentional about what work should remain human to preserve meaning, ownership, and judgment.
