The situation
AI work debt
Corrections, checks, improvised trade-offs: part of the time saved with AI goes back into what teams have to redo behind it. That is work debt. It can be measured, and it can be avoided upstream.
Measure the debt on one of your journeysWhat the field measures
- Nearly four of every ten hours saved are absorbed by corrections and checks. Workday, 2026.
- 1 h 51 per incident: the average time to deal with unusable AI content received from a colleague. BetterUp, 2025.
- 89% of organisations have adapted fewer than half of their roles to AI. Workday, 2026.
- 70% of the transformation concerns people and the organisation. A marker of effort, not a duration measured per employee. BCG, 2026.
Where the debt comes from
Strategy firms bring a direction. Vendors deliver platforms. Integrators deploy. Then your teams carry on with tools that decide differently from them. What is lost on the way: the implicit trade-offs only your experts know, the exceptions and rules nobody wrote down, hours of correction and checking that fall back on the teams.
How to avoid it
Upstream, before building: extract with the experts the way they decide, design the operating model between people and AI, and set a performance baseline before deployment. A company built before AI must evolve its responsibilities, skills and ways of working. That is a leader's decision before it is an IT project.
Questions raised in committee
What is AI work debt?
The time teams spend correcting, checking and arbitrating behind an AI that decides differently from them. It absorbs part of the time AI was supposed to save.
How do we measure it?
By taking a baseline on one precise journey: lead time, quality, cost per file, human workload, before and after deployment. The difference between the expected gain and the measured gain is the debt.
Is it a tool problem?
Rarely. It is a problem of business reasoning missing from the tool. The same tool, fed with the way your experts decide, stops producing corrections.
Let us talk about your ambition.
Tell us what you want for your company and what is holding its transformation back today. A precise business journey is a good entry point, though not a requirement.
Measure the debt on one of your journeys