- Employees who reshape their jobs around AI report higher engagement and motivation at work.
- Multiverse found that "job crafting" with AI cuts down on low-effort, low-quality "AI slop."
- Deeper AI collaboration links to higher focus, energy, and commitment, the researchers said.
Tired of "AI slop"? A team of learning scientists at AI skills platform Multiverse says there's a fix.
Employees who take the initiative to reshape their roles around artificial intelligence — rather than simply using it to speed through tasks — are more engaged, motivated, and creative at work, according to new research from Multiverse, the upskilling platform for AI and tech adoption.
The study, conducted in June and July, analyzed 295 UK full-time professionals across industries, including finance, government, and technology, all of whom had used generative AI for at least six months.
It found that those who actively "job craft" — redesign their tasks and workflows to integrate AI — experience significantly higher engagement than those who use the technology passively.
"Job crafting essentially means reexamining the components of your role and reshaping them to suit the needs of the task at hand," Barry Goulding, an organizational psychologist at Multiverse, told Business Insider.
"So moving from 'this is my job' to 'this is how I could do my job better.'"
'AI slop' comes from low engagement
The Multiverse team sees "AI slop" — the flood of low-quality, generic output produced by generative AI — as a symptom of disengagement rather than a flaw of the technology itself.
"AI slop is a function of employees not properly engaging with the tech," Goulding said.
"Copy-pasting a report written by AI without reviewing or revising it isn't an indicator of a highly engaged employee, nor does it suggest that they are deeply collaborating with the AI tool they're using," he added.
Job crafters, on the other hand, he said, are the ones who "catch errors, question the AI's logic, and ultimately ensure the final product is high-quality."
By training employees to think critically about how AI fits into their role, companies can curb sloppy output and foster higher-quality work, he added.
AI engagement isn't automatic — it depends on intent
The findings also challenged a popular narrative that AI reduces cognitive engagement.
While some studies, including OpenAI and MIT's research on ChatGPT and Oxford University Press's study on AI tools, have found that AI can cause people to think less deeply, Multiverse's data suggests that when used intentionally, AI can actually increase focus and dedication.
"If the intent is low-effort automation, you'll no doubt see low cognitive and employee engagement," Goulding said.
"But our data shows that when employees use AI with intent, and proactively reshape their job around it, their absorption, dedication, and vigor (the factors that make up employee engagement) increase."
Goulding said this proactive mindset helps employees move from a passive to an active relationship with AI.
He cited a customer service manager, for instance, who could go beyond answering tickets one by one and instead use AI to analyze trends and recommend process improvements.
That kind of mindset shift, he added, "can provoke a real uptick in work engagement."
How leaders can make 'job crafting' part of their AI strategy
To harness these benefits, Goulding said AI adoption needs to go beyond rolling out new tools.
"Handing out licenses to AI tools without training employees in how to use them is pretty much guaranteed to ensure lower-quality outputs, low engagement, and negligible impact on productivity," he said.
He recommends embedding training within broader AI strategies, measuring outcomes, and giving employees space to experiment.
Leadership, he added, plays a crucial role in setting expectations and modelling the right behaviour.
"Give employees the agency to reshape their roles and the licence to experiment within guardrails," Goulding said. "Lead from the front."
He pointed to the consulting firm Capita as an example of a company that has made AI adoption a strategic transition, rather than just a tech rollout.
One employee there, after being trained in AI, built an "Ask Me Anything" assistant that has already handled more than 70,000 queries across the firm, he said.
Don't track job crafting — track what it drives
Rather than trying to measure "job crafting" directly, Goulding advised leaders to focus on the outcomes it's meant to drive.
"You won't see value if you're just trying to track a behavior," he said.
"It's more important to measure the output and impact you're after: is productivity improving? Are employee engagement scores going up?"
He added that training people to use AI effectively within their context naturally leads to curiosity, problem-solving, and higher-quality collaboration with the technology.
Goulding said he believes job crafting will soon become a core competency for the AI era.
"AI will change how we all work," he said. "Those who grab hold of the reins will win quicker and win bigger than those that don't — and the benefits will multiply at an organizational level if you can embed these behaviours through tech training."
