Botsitting

Botsitting is the hidden second job that arrives after the machine was meant to save you time. You supply the missing context, rewrite the prompt, compare three strangely similar answers, check the citations, correct the confident nonsense and press ‘try again’ until the coffee has gone cold and the original task looks quite restful. The Work AI Index 2026 named and measured this labour after surveying six thousand digital workers. The point is not that checking AI is unfair; important work should be checked. The problem is pretending the checking does not exist when calculating the miraculous productivity gain. When organisations budget for instant AI speed but not for the person cleaning up behind it, exhaustion follows, and exhausted people stop checking. That is when botsitting slides into botshitting, which is not a promotion.