Six hours, and where they go
Directors and above report spending six hours a week correcting AI output. Individual contributors spend three. The correction load rises with seniority, and not for a mysterious reason — that same group runs the most AI-assisted work, 63% of it against 34% for individual contributors.
Six hours is the better part of a working day, every week. It appears in no productivity calculation anywhere. Not on a slide, not in a business case, not in the figure anyone quotes when they say the tool has paid for itself.
It is not hidden. It is never added up.
Notice how that number was obtained, though. Somebody asked, and people answered. It is missing from the business case because nobody totals it, not because nobody knows it.
Correction time doesn't get filed as AI time. It gets logged as editing. Reviewing. Tightening something before it goes out. All of that is ordinary work, so it lands in the general column, while the ninety minutes the draft didn't take lands in the AI column. The ledger only ever records the credit side.
The people carrying the cost are the ones making the case
The same senior group is also the most likely to report producing lower-quality AI-assisted work — 31% against 26% overall. And among workers who use AI at all, 44% say their own output contains material below the standard they would otherwise hold themselves to.
So the heaviest correction load sits with the people most likely to be presenting the savings, working from a figure that has never had the other side entered against it. Not because anyone is hiding anything. Because only one column was ever kept.
Get the baseline before you claim the saving
Before asking what AI is saving you, find out what you are spending to put it right. That number is available for the asking, usually larger than anyone expects, and it is the only baseline that makes a savings claim checkable at all.
It does not need a system. Ask a handful of people to note, for two weeks, the time they spend fixing AI output before it goes anywhere — and to log it as correction, not as editing. Two weeks is enough to see the shape of it. The point is not precision. The point is having any number at all on the side of the ledger that currently has none.
Put both sides of that number in front of you. The Cost of Inaction calculator does exactly that: Run the numbers →
Keep reading: The cost-to-check rule · Half of leaders already see their teams losing skills to AI
This is the thinking behind a Trusted AI Culture.
Sources: SHRM, "Navigating AI in the Workplace" (2026). All figures are for workers who use or have used AI at work.