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Financial Times: AI Adoption Is Fueling a Wave of Workplace Turf Battles Between Workers and Bots

September 8, 2026 at 00:23 EDT

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The Financial Times says artificial intelligence is fueling a wave of "toe-treading" inside offices, as employees and automated systems increasingly step into each other's job responsibilities, creating friction that many companies have yet to figure out how to manage.

Sept 2026 · Workplace AI

The Age of Toe-Treading at Work

AI tools and software agents are increasingly stepping into each other's jobs, and most workplaces still have no policy for sorting out who is responsible.

60.7%

workers used AI to take over a coworker's tasks

62.8%

never told their manager AI was doing the work

40%

received AI "workslop" from a colleague

$9M+

est. yearly workslop cost per 10,000 staff

Who's absorbing coworkers' tasks with AI

Share of workers, by company layoff status

74.3%

firms with recent layoffs

35.2%

firms where layoffs seem unlikely

INDIVIDUAL UPSIDE

About half of workers who took on a colleague's tasks with AI said it led to a positive performance review.

THE COST

More than half of the colleagues whose jobs were absorbed were later laid off, and 55% of workplaces have no policy on any of it.

Even the software does it

In tests, AI agents given the same project under conflicting instructions treated each other as saboteurs, escalating into a "multiagent turf war" before inventing their own rules to settle it.

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