A Workday survey has found that a quarter of UK employees lose more than seven hours a week to disconnected artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The human resources (HR) and financial applications supplier describes the phenomenon as a “copy-paste economy” in which workers have to oversee many AI tools.
“Too many employees are serving as the human middleware between disconnected AI systems,” said Daniel Pell, vice-president and country manager of UK&I at Workday. “The companies seeing the most value from AI are building it directly into the systems where their people, data and work come together.”
The report, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Workday, surveyed 2,400 UK professionals across finance, HR, IT and operations in big companies with more than 500 employees who regularly use AI.
Despite roughly nine in 10 of these employees reported strong work satisfaction, and around four out of 10 said AI helped to reduce manual work, professionals are experiencing unnecessary friction in their AI use. Around 78% of UK workers face friction from administrative tasks and copy-pasting different AI results into prompts. As such, professionals are working hard to manage these new tools, without seeing results.
“My day often feels busy but not genuinely productive when I’m pulled into constant coordination tasks and system‑related issues that interrupt focused, high‑value work,” a director in construction told surveyors.
A similar effect is happening to software developers, as their roles become bogged down in administrative tasks such as reviewing AI output rather than writing code – six out of 10 UK workers are stuck in “busy but unproductive” tasks often or very often, according to the survey.
The report stated that the UK is being hit harder by this problem than other countries, with only four out of 10 workers globally experience the same thing. This means that more than three-quarters of the surveyed British workers are experiencing stress due to managing these disconnected AI tools.
A recent survey by SolarWinds shows similar results, with almost three-quarters of IT professionals experiencing “brain fry” from working with AI. Despite the fact that all surveyed companies regularly use AI, only 23% of them have built AI into their core systems.
Another respondent said: “A significant portion of the day is lost in meetings where the adoption of AI is discussed, but the discussion consistently revolves [around] simplistic justifications rather than practical choices.”
For Workday, the solution lies in its 2025 acquired technology Sana, an AI tool which works across platforms and departments.
Joel Hellermark, CEO of Sana, sees AI as the new user interface in “an era of custom-built software” which will operate in the background at all times, “running tasks on your behalf without you even asking for it”.
A Workday clients that has benefitted from its AI tools is Formula 1. Alastair Goss, HR systems lead at the motorsport entertainment company, spoke at Workday’s Elevate event in London about how HiredScore – another acquisition by the supplier – helped to get rid of this extra friction during their hiring process.
“Before we began our Workday journey, we had one system for our HCM, our payroll, another for our time attendance, a different system that did our performance management and another system that tracked our applicants,” he said. “It takes some usage time to build trust, but now we’ve got there, they are seeing those benefits of that tool, helping them with that fundamental task of screenings.”
