How AI ‘workslop’ is impacting revenue organizations

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AI has infiltrated virtually every industry under the sun, and if it hasn’t already, it is coming to a rev org near you soon. Sadly, along with efficiency, it is also producing some less than stellar work.

According to a September study published in the Harvard Business Review by BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab, the proliferation of AI in the workplace has birthed a new term: “workslop.” It’s defined as “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” The study says 40% of respondents have received workslop in the month prior to survey publication.

“It’s this overreliance on ChatGPT to do the thinking,” said Debra Andrews, founder and president of consulting firm Marketri. “It could be [employees] just starting to get lazy and rely[ing] on it too much to do the part that should be uniquely human.”

Perhaps most notably, AI has sunk its teeth into the sales world, where AI SDRs contribute heavily to lead generation and AI is deployed for outreach and research.

As column inches dedicated to AI stealing sales jobs pile up, sales organizations are searching for the sweet spot between human nuance and automated efficiency—but the land mines are growing thanks to the “slop.”

Cutting corners

Stacie Sussman, chief revenue officer of RevUp Advisory, says she sees workslop a lot with sales outreach.

“A lot of sentences would start with ‘here’s the truth,’ and then there’s the two colons,” said Sussman. “It’s so obvious your AI is following a certain grammatical formatting.”

Sales professionals tend to agree that a human touch is needed when reaching out to prospective clients, and although AI is creating unprecedented opportunities, access to vast reservoirs of information doesn’t necessarily help create personalized interactions.

“It’s the same email from 15 different companies over time,” said Sussman. “They’re obviously using some sort of AI and not having any creativity around what those sales sequences look like.”

Better prompts = better outcomes

Sussman and Andrews agreed that better prompting and training around AI tools can significantly reduce workslop.

“If you’re putting in the right inputs into AI…it will give you good answers that you can take and think through and then put the final touches on, so it can still expedite your work,” Andrews said.

Sussman believes that overly simplistic prompting leads to workslop, calling it a “one-two punch” that “spits back some information.” She provides training on this to the RevUp Advisory staff as well as to other startups through her work with the nonprofit, the Venture Mentoring Team.

“The art of prompting and then the finessing of what is getting back to you needs to be iterated over time so you’re not just getting the first output,” she said.

Long-term gains vs. short-term wins

AI’s bias toward speed over quality can be attractive to salespeople, but those looking for long-term wins might be better off finessing their AI prompts first, which involves thinking about sequencing beyond the first pitch and emphasizing cadence and follow-up.

For revenue organizations more broadly, the risk is losing the magic sauce that makes your team and business stand out.

“If a company is being plagued with workslop, they’re just going to end up with very average outputs,” Andrews said. “For some companies, that might be OK…but the problem is that there’s going to be a leveling effect…You’re just going to see the graying of outputs. They’re all going to start to look and sound the same.”