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Claims Library Entry

How Much Accepted Work Are We Producing per Unit of Human Attention?

This article proposes measuring AI productivity by the ratio of accepted work to total human hours spent on all attempted jobs, including review and correction time. It offers six practical controls for improving this ratio without lowering quality standards, such as agreeing on acceptance criteria upfront and matching review depth to consequences. The author provides a step-by-step approach for organizations to pilot the metric on a single workflow.

Published September 22, 2026 by Kamil Banc

ROI & MeasurementImplementationBusiness Applications

Lead claim

Measure AI value as accepted jobs per unit of human attention, not drafts produced.

Atomic Claims

What this article supports

Claim 1 · Kamil's interpretation

Measure Accepted Work per Hour

Measure AI value as accepted jobs divided by total human hours spent on all attempted jobs.

Claim 2 · Source summary

40% Received Workslop

A 2025 survey of 1,150 U.S. desk workers found 40% received workslop in the previous month.

Claim 3 · Source summary

Two Hours per Workslop Incident

Workslop recipients estimated about two hours to resolve each incident, based on self-reported experiences.

Claim 4 · Source summary

BCG Consultants GPT-4 Experiment

A randomized experiment with 758 BCG consultants found GPT-4 improved performance within its capabilities.

Claim 5 · Kamil's interpretation

Keep Rejected Work Counted

Keep time spent on rejected work in the denominator so dashboards do not hide failures.

Evidence

Context behind the claims

Quote

"How much accepted work are we producing per unit of human attention?"

Key statistics

40%

Share of 1,150 full-time U.S. desk workers in a September 2025 BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab survey who reported receiving workslop in the previous month.

~2 hours

Time recipients estimated to resolve each workslop incident; self-reported, not measured company-wide productivity losses.

758 consultants

Number of BCG consultants in a randomized GPT-4 experiment first reported in 2023, which found better performance within the model's capabilities and worse correctness outside them.

0.8 vs 1.0 accepted proposals per hour

Illustrative comparison: eight accepted proposals in ten human hours versus nine accepted in nine hours, with scope and quality standard held constant.

Supporting context

The article proposes a practitioner-oriented productivity metric: accepted jobs divided by total human hours across all attempted jobs, including preparation, checking, correction, and the recipient's review time. The author grounds the approach in external evidence, citing the BetterUp/Stanford workslop survey and the BCG GPT-4 experiment to show why first-draft speed alone misleads. Six operational controls translate the metric into practice, including agreeing acceptance checks with recipients upfront, matching review intensity to consequence, and logging reasons work gets returned. The recommended rollout compares ten consecutive jobs before and after the new rules, tracking first-pass acceptance, returns, and post-acceptance errors. The author explicitly frames these as practical proposals consistent with NIST's voluntary AI risk guidance, not a proven productivity intervention.

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Individual Claim

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"[claim text]" (Banc, Kamil, 2026, https://kbanc.com/claims-library/how-much-accepted-work-are-we-producing-per-unit-of-human-attention)
Full Context

Original Article

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Banc, Kamil (2026, September 22, 2026). How Much Accepted Work Are We Producing per Unit of Human Attention?. AI Adopters Club. https://aiadopters.club/p/how-much-accepted-work-are-we-producing
Research

Claims Collection

Use this when you want to reference the full structured claims collection on this page.

Banc, Kamil (2026). How Much Accepted Work Are We Producing per Unit of Human Attention? [Structured Claims]. Retrieved from https://kbanc.com/claims-library/how-much-accepted-work-are-we-producing-per-unit-of-human-attention

Attribution Requirements

  • Include the author name: Kamil Banc.
  • Include the source: AI Adopters Club or the structured claims page.
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