Artificial Intelligence AI Botsitting Bubble
BOTSITTING BUBBLE // Are you wasting hours of time in a botsitting bubble waiting for an AI bot to do things quicker for you when you could have ‘done it yourself’ in less time? 🤔
As someone who has an extensive range of both analogue and digital experience, here are my thoughts…
- Understand the ‘real time’ – in the past, I have had a 10 minute rule with technology – if I can’t work something out in 10 minutes, I take a break and come back to it. Now, I have a 5 minute rule and if asking AI cannot help me in 5 minutes, I use my brain or my existing skills instead!
- Understand efficiency and effectiveness – sure, AI can do some things quicker – but are you achieving outcomes or are you just being ‘busier?’ Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it is worth doing.
- Understand how you are perceived – by colleagues who see you wasting time on an AI chatbot and by people who can’t trust that you actually produced the work. Is your botsitting improving or disproving your capability?
- Understand the true cost – nothing is ever really ‘free.’ But getting a ‘free’ service to do what a paid product can do that is tried, tested, reliable and updated regularly is false economy.
I like knowing that a programmer keeps thinking of what multiple consumers need and incorporates it into their offering rather than me guessing or asking AI to guess what I need. - Understand relationships – a bot is not your friend. It is your ‘servant’ (for now). Real people bring a variety of wisdom and lived experience and they don’t just reproduce an answer that has already been published, they often provide an answer that was never published or calculated.
- Understand commitment – fostering reciprocal respect and commitment amongst your colleagues ensures that you are all greater than the sum of your parts. Being committed to a leader’s vision, or your KPIs or goals ensures that you don’t just go for the quick win, you see the bigger picture and you incorporate that in your use of AI approach.
- Understand what AI chatbots are good at – remember that accuracy is not guaranteed and you still have to check what it produces.
- Understand the risks – are you handing over confidential data (even in the paid version) and where could this ‘end up?’ Have you sought permission before uploading it?
- Understand unintended consequences – these are very real, particularly with Agentic AI – where the AI completes tasks on your behalf. Yes, there are some barriers to being able to access the resources you need to complete many tasks, but the question should also be asked, what are you unleashing when you do this?
- Maintain global respect – we are all here to share this wonderful planet and all of us should understand and maintain respect for our fellow humans. The race for supremacy fails us all. There is true wealth in peace and justice for all.
AI was NOT used to create this content.
Other Articles
Botsitting Definition – ‘The largely unrecognized, unbudgeted, and untracked labor of making AI usable — feeding it context, supervising its output, debugging its mistakes, and cleaning up after it.’
Botsitting, botshitting, and the hidden human labor of AI at work – from the Work AI Institute
Are we developing a generation of ‘botsitters’ at work? By Dan F Stapleton for the Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI).
The University of Sydney has just released The 2027 Skills Horizon – What leaders need to know next report – well worth a read online at https://plus.sydney.edu.au/sites/default/files/2026-09/2027-skills-horizon.pdf
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