UK firms are spending billions on AI – but getting extra admin in return
UK companies are pouring copious amounts of money into AI, while their employees spend nearly a full day each week doing work that AI was supposed to eliminate, new research has found.
According to Workday, one in four UK workers loses seven or more hours a week moving information between systems, chasing down data and manually feeding context into AI tools that cannot access it themselves.
More than 60 per cent of UK employees say they regularly have days that feel hectic but deliver little of real value, a rate 17 percentage points above the global average.
Dan Pell, Workday‘s UK and Ireland country manager, told Morning Wire the problem stemmed from companies adding AI tools on top of existing systems rather than integrating them.
“Everything seems disconnected,” he said. “Humans are becoming the middleware. You’re kind of going from system to system to system.”
“One in four workers are spending like seven hours a week moving information, reconciling data between different platforms”, he added. “It’s basically a day a week of really unproductive work.”
The research, based on a survey of 2,400 UK professionals in finance, HR, IT and operations conducted in March, found that more than half of UK workers, or 53 per cent, feel burned out. This compares with 46 per cent globally.
Three-quarters say decisions at their organisation are regularly delayed because information is missing or unclear, and a similar proportion say teams frequently argue over whose data is correct.
Pell said: “You’ve seen organisations try and strip back and reduce back-office functions in particular, look to replace them maybe with AI, removing junior roles. And therefore you’re finding the value hasn’t quite delivered yet from the AI tooling.”
“It’s individual productivity but it’s not wholesale organisational productivity”, he added.
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Meanwhile, 19 per cent of UK employees say they do not trust AI outputs, with many reporting they spend more time checking AI-generated work than they save using it.
Pell said: “We’ve all done this, right? You go into an AI tool of your choice, it comes back with an answer to a question or a summary and you go, ‘That looks great,’ and then you actually start going through it and go, ‘Hold on, that’s not quite right.’ And therefore you spend more time going in and fact-checking.”
“You’ve created something that looks brilliant, it sounds very confident, it sounds very competent, but then actually with your knowledge of that particular space you go in and check it.”
The findings are consistent with broader evidence that AI is delivering at the level of individual tasks rather than organisations as a whole.
Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, published last month, found that while AI adoption is accelerating rapidly, most organisations have yet to redesign roles around it.
Gallup’s most recent US data also found that 65 per cent of employees in AI-adopting firms say the tech has improved their personal productivity, but only around one in ten strongly agree it has fundamentally changed how their organisation operates.
Workday found that among companies where AI is built into core systems, 57 per cent of employees report cutting their task time by at least a quarter.
Among those where AI tools sit alongside existing systems rather than inside them, that figure falls to 24 per cent.
Pell said the solution is connecting the ones that already exist, and demonstrated a system during the interview that draws together emails, calendar entries, sales data and HR records.
He said he had built it himself without any technical knowledge. “It’s a bit like telling your colleague to do something. If you’re not precise enough they’ll come back with 70 per cent of what you asked.”
“Everything is still kind of isolated and singular”, he added. “How do you add intelligence, how do you create AI technology that connects all these disparate systems together and provides you insight? That is the opportunity.”
Pell warned that without action, the high levels of workplace engagement the research also uncovered could quickly unravel.
“If we’re not careful and we don’t join up all these systems then we risk losing it,” he said. “The feeling burned out by work and feeling disengaged is higher in the UK than it is on the global percentage as well.”