The hidden AI risk CFOs shouldn’t ignore

Deloitte Australia recently took an embarrassing blow to its reputation when a report it compiled for the Australian government turned out to contain numerous AI-generated hallucinations. The firm will have to refund part of the $290,000 the Australian government paid for the report.

Though the Deloitte Australia incident’s unusual in that it involves a Big Four firm, it may point to a broader issue with poorly edited or cut-and-pasted AI-generated content in the workplace. The phenomenon’s even got a catchy name: workslop.

Workslop’s toll: A Stanford University and BetterUp Labs survey published in the Harvard Business Review found that 40% of 1,150 US employees across a range of industries said they’d received workslop from colleagues in the past month. Staff estimated that around 15% of the work product they get is workslop, and that they spent an average of nearly two hours dealing with each incident. Workslop “shifts the burden of the work downstream” to the people who receive it and who then must fact-check, correct, rewrite, or interpret it, the authors wrote. Staff lose trust in coworkers who send them work products with obvious errors or that lack context, the StanfordHBR study found.

Workslop can have “pretty detrimental” effects on culture, Asha Palmer, SVP of compliance solutions at Skillsoft, told CFO Brew. Workslop can ultimately lead to “reputational damage” for both the organizations and individuals involved, Palmer said.

Preventing workslop: Leaders can help minimize the chances of workslop by creating norms and procedures around AI use in the workplace. AI policies alone aren’t enough, Palmer said. They’re “necessary but not sufficient…How you hold people accountable to those policies really has nothing to do with the document itself” but with the culture around it, she added.

Company leaders need to set the tone, preferably by using AI themselves, Bret Greenstein, chief AI officer for consulting firm West Monroe, told CFO Brew. Some leaders are “hoping their teams will motivate everyone and teach them” to use AI, he said. “But it just doesn’t work that way.”

Instead, he recommends modeling and demonstrating the behavior they want to see. “You want to reward the effective behavior: high-quality, accurate work, well-researched, in the proper context.”

Managers can also get out ahead of workslop, by assuming they’ll encounter it at some point, Palmer said. They can “work [their] way backward,” and ask themselves what they’d need to do to prevent it. For instance, managers and leaders need to communicate their expectations and hold people accountable to them, or build in controls.

Curation and fact-checking: As AI’s a new development, employees are going to need not only new norms about it but also new skills for working with it—ones that go beyond just prompting. One of them is curation, Greenstein believes. The reason workslop has arisen, he said, is that “at work, people can now produce so much more content, so much more quickly.” That high volume of work product is “creating different dynamics on what content actually means,” he said.

Before LLMs, “if you produced a beautifully written paper, the effort that went into it showed that it was probably pretty good,” he said. Now AI makes it possible to create content that looks polished on the surface but that might not be meaningful or correct. The task is to separate the signal from the noise, he said. In this environment employees may need to convince others that their content is “worth reading.” Greenstein said he’s seeing them do so already through techniques such as executive summaries and putting their work in context.

In other words, trust matters. “Your judgment, your credibility, your critical thinking is the value that says this thing I’m handing you is probably worth looking at,” he said.

Palmer believes employees will need to learn to fact-check and follow up on the citations or quotes that AI gives them. “We have to know that AI is just the start. It’s not necessarily the end of the process,” she said.