'Copy/paste economy' | UK workers losing up to a day per week managing AI tools

UK employees are losing nearly a full work day each week switching between disconnected AI tools and systems.

New research from Workday, the enterprise AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, found that one in four UK workers spend seven or more hours a week copying information between applications, reconciling conflicting data and manually feeding context into AI tools.

The report, “The Copy/Paste Economy: Why Task-Oriented AI Is Failing the Enterprise,” surveyed 2,400 UK professionals across finance, HR, IT and operations. The results showed that while many employees say AI helps them complete individual tasks faster, those gains are often offset by the time spent switching between systems, checking outputs and manually moving information across tools.

The data points to a UK workforce that is engaged but also overburdened by the very technology intended to help them. While workers remain optimistic about AI and its potential, with over half of UK employees reporting that AI is already reducing their task times, these individual efficiencies are not translating to total time saved.

This creates a “faster but not better” reality for the workforce. In the rush to adopt AI, businesses are prioritising new features without ensuring that the technology can work together. While an isolated application might speed up one specific task, managing the disconnect slows down the rest of the day for workers.