Workday research reveals the cost of a Copy/Paste economy, and why acting as human middleware is burning out employees and leaving organisations stuck in the pre-AI era.
Daniel Pell
Vice President and Country Manager for UK and Ireland
Workday
Let me tell you something that might surprise you. Here in the UK, most people like their jobs.
I don’t want to do us down, but as a nation we don’t tend to think of ourselves in that way. Ask someone how their day at work was, and “not too bad” is about as upbeat as you can expect.
But our latest research published today at Workday Elevate London shows that the vast majority of UK workers surveyed (97%) rate their day-to-day work positively. As business leaders from across industries join us in the capital, I’m sure they’ll welcome this news.
A happy, motivated workforce, ready to unleash the power of AI. It should all be plain-sailing from here. Finally, we no longer have to suffer the headlines about the UK’s productivity problems.
And yet…
Dig a little deeper into the findings and they tell us something different.
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Our research found that nearly two-thirds of UK workers (60%) report having busy days with little to no real progress, compared to just 43% globally.
We’re busy, and work certainly feels busier than ever, but are we doing the things that deliver value to our organisations? And if we aren’t, where is all this energy and enthusiasm for work going?
We found that UK employees are increasingly functioning as human middleware for their organisations, acting as the integration layer holding disconnected systems together. They’re taking information from one system and feeding it into another. Coordinating and translating data between systems instead of creating value. The systems that were going to make us more productive, turns out we’re working for them now.
And that has a cost. This artificial busyness of stitching together different systems is a primary driver of strain amongst the workforce. More than three quarters of UK workers say the majority of their work stress stems from navigating internal processes and systems.
We’ve all felt it. It’s the jumping between the multiple tabs you have open in your browser, or trying to work out if the document you’ve definitely seen before is on email or slack, or looking at different sets of numbers and figuring out which one is right. It’s frustrating, time-consuming, and unfulfilling work.
As well as being a waste of people’s effort and positivity, this hollow busyness is a risk to organisations. Three quarters of UK employees (75%) say decisions are delayed or fail because of missing information and a similar number (74%) say teams argue over whose numbers are correct. More troublingly, more than half of workers (53%) are feeling burned out as a result, compared to 46% globally, creating a significant threat to long-term talent retention and mental health.
So how do we go about fixing it?
As Workday highlighted earlier this year at the World Economic Forum, productivity for it’s own sake is meaningless if it doesn’t turn into real business impact and enable deeper human connection.
Rather than continually asking employees to work harder, the solution lies in fixing the integration layer between systems so people don’t have to do the job that technology should have been doing in the first place.
Most UK organisations have introduced AI, but they are treating it like a high-tech fix. To unlock AI’s full potential, it has to be built into the systems where their people, data and work come together.
Employees are already showing organisations how they want AI to work: integrated directly into workflows, proactively surfacing insights, and handling coordination in the background. We want intelligence on tap, but if it’s not plumbed in properly, your employees are left running around with buckets trying to mop things up.
The payoff for getting the plumbing right is staggering. Among organisations with AI deeply embedded in core systems, 57% of employees report that AI has reduced task time by 25% or more. Among those where AI is not used in core systems at all, that figure is 39%. This is nearly twice the difference between embedded and non-embedded, driven entirely by where in the operating model AI sits.
The successful agent use cases we see today—routing approvals, monitoring metrics, or assisting with financial close—are all examples of the technology operating inside the workflow, not alongside it.
People are ready, but AI has to work the way they do: accurate, consistent, and operating as an intelligent, invisible element in the flow of work. The challenge is that the working environment was designed for the pre-AI era.
It’s not about using AI to do more, but changing the way we think about work so it can be tailored to what humans and AI each do best. The organisations that understand this have AI integrated into the flow of work. That’s the strategic shift from working faster to working better. Fix the foundation. AI adoption will follow.
The full Copy/Paste Economy report breaks down the things business leaders need to know to build the new work day. Ready to find out how to get the best out of your workforce? Get the report.
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