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Breaking Job News: AI Work Slop Costs Companies Millions 25% of Jobs Being Transformed By AI

• Pete Newsome

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A new Indeed 2025 AI at Work Report reveals a startling truth: one in four jobs posted last year could be highly transformed by artificial intelligence, and more than half face moderate transformation. From prompt engineering to basic math skills, AI is moving faster than anyone expected, and the future of work is being rewritten before our eyes.

But not all transformations are positive. Harvard Business Review warns of rising “AI work slop,” content that appears polished but is actually incorrect. With 40% of U.S. employees reporting that they received subpar AI work in the last month, businesses are paying the price: wasted hours, lost trust, and an estimated $9 million annual cost for a company of 10,000 employees.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Fed’s new labor market indicators show unemployment holding steady at 4.3%, signaling a fragile equilibrium. The big question: Can workers and companies harness AI’s potential without drowning in its flaws?

In this video, host Pete Newsome breaks down:
1. The four AI transformation categories impacting 3,000+ job skills
2. Why hybrid AI-human collaboration may be the future of work
3. How AI errors are costing businesses money AND damaging workplace trust
4. What these trends mean for the job market going into 2025

News Articles:
1. Indeed's AI at Work Report: https://www.hiringlab.org/2025/09/23/ai-at-work-report-2025-how-genai-is-rewiring-the-dna-of-jobs/
2. Harvard Business Review AI-generated "Workslop" is destroying productivity: https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity
3. Chicago Fed Labor Market Indicators: https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-insights/2025/introducing-chicago-fed-labor-market-indicators

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Pete Newsome:

Today's job market headlines include a warning from Harvard Business Review about the growing problem that they call AI work slop, and a debut from the Chicago Fed that gives us an early look at unemployment before the official jobs report comes out. But first, indeed's hiring lab released its 2025 AI at work report, where they analyzed 2,900 work skills to understand how exposed they are to generative AI. The research grouped the skills into four categories Minimal transformation, which are skills that AI has little ability to change, like patient care and employee relations. That's about 40% of the skills analyzed. Assisted transformation, where AI can provide some support, like creating templates or doing research, but humans are still very much needed for the core work. That's 19% of skills. Hybrid transformation, where AI can reliably perform pretty much all the routine work, but humans will remain essential for oversight and interpretation of what the AI is doing, and that's things like proofreading, travel planning, medical coding another 40% of all skills. And then full transformation. Those are highly structured, rules-based skills that AI has the ability to execute independently, like basic math and prompt engineering. 19 of the skills analyzed this year fell into that category and while that's less than 1%, so it doesn't seem like a big number there were none on the report last year, so it was zero.

Pete Newsome:

So we're seeing a big shift taking place as we speak, and the findings related to job postings were also pretty eye-opening. About a quarter of all the jobs posted on Indeed in the past year could be highly transformed by AI. Think about that One out of four jobs highly transformed. That is frightening. Also, more than half of all jobs currently fall into the middle ground of what they consider moderate transformation, where the impact will be determined by how quickly employers adopt the tools that are available and how well the employees are able to adapt. Nearly half of all the skills listed currently on a typical US job posting falls into hybrid transformation, where, again, ai can handle much of the work, but humans are still very much needed, at least for now. Speaking of, the report concludes by saying that what we're witnessing right now is not a temporary phase. It's the structural shift that underpins how Gen AI is beginning to rewire the DNA of jobs. Hybrid transformation is not a temporary phase. It's the structural shift that underpins how Gen AI is beginning to rewire the DNA of jobs. Hybrid transformation is not a bridge to full transformation. It is, for many roles, the destination. All right. So when it comes to AI. I'm not ready to conclude that anything is final, far from it. I think we are very much in the early stages, but undoubtedly there is a massive shift taking place place, and it's happening, whether we like it or not, in the next headline.

Pete Newsome:

According to harvard business review, there's a growing problem inside workplaces that are embracing ai. Employees are cranking out what researchers call work slop. The term refers to ai generated work that looks polished on the surface but is actually inaccurate and unhelpful. We've all seen that before, I think. So here's what's happening Instead of saving time, the AI generated content is creating more work for those who inherit it and then have to clean it up, and it's a problem that's growing because AI adoption is growing. It's doubled in the past two years and at this point, pretty much every company is incorporating more ai into their processes. And all that's taking place despite nobody making any money yet on it. 95 of organizations are not seeing any measurable return on ai investment, so this may be a reason for that.

Pete Newsome:

According to this survey from BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab, they found that employees are offloading tasks to AI, but no one's checking. There's no oversight. They're just pushing the bad work product downstream. So here's what the survey results show 40% of US employees claim to have been the recipient of WorkSlop in the past month, and around 15% of all workplace content now qualifies as such. Each incident takes around two hours to resolve, which equates to $186 per employee per month, and at a company of 10,000 workers that translates into more than $9 million per year in lost productivity, and the damage that's being done extends beyond lost time and money. 53% of employees said receiving work slop left them annoyed. No surprise there at all. Surprise is not higher 42% viewed the sender as less trustworthy and 30% viewed the sender as less intelligent. So less trustworthy, less intelligent. Nobody wants to be viewed that way, so consider that before sending any AI content out. The article sums it up by saying low effort, unhelpful, AI generated work is having a significant impact on collaboration. Yes, makes perfect sense to me. The robots are here to stay. We know that at this point they're not going away, so let's figure out how to use them to our benefit, not to our detriment. Don't make life worse for your colleagues. They'll thank you for it In the final headline today.

Pete Newsome:

This morning, the Chicago Fed introduced its labor market indicators, which will combine real time private sector data with official labor statistics to provide a timely and comprehensive view of labor market conditions. So they claim We'll find out over time how reliable it is. But here are the three indicators the real-time unemployment rate forecast, which predicts the official unemployment rate. The layoff and separations rate, which measures how many people are losing or leaving jobs, and then the hiring rate for unemployed workers, which tracks how many job seekers are successfully moving into being employed. So what did today's numbers say? Well, for September they're projecting 4.3% unemployment, which is the same as August. Separations are up, but so is hiring. So those two numbers essentially cancel each other out. My takeaway after reading the report is that it's a whole lot of nothing happening right now in the job market. We're not seeing any changes, we're not seeing any improvement, we're not seeing any significant decline. It's just flat. We need to see improvement soon. More rate cuts probably on the horizon. Hopefully that'll help. So those are the major job market headlines today. But here's a fun fact before we go In Japan there's actually a word for dying from too much work.

Pete Newsome:

It's called karoshi, or at least I think that's how it's pronounced. It literally means death from overwork. So don't let that happen. Work is not worth it. Stay alive out there, everyone, until next time at least. So thanks for watching. I really appreciate it. Please like, subscribe, share with anyone who you think might be interested and, as always, I welcome any feedback you have. So I look forward to talking to you tomorrow.