Reporting slop is a subcategory of Process Slop.
Reporting Slop is all the reports that get created simply because AI suggested them as a good idea for your business, your department, your clients…
First, let’s take a step back though.
I think we’ve all had that experience in our careers where we’re asked to create a report (or to continue preparing a report) for the business that seems like busywork. No one seems to know why the report is needed or what value it provides, other than “we’ve always prepared it each week/month/quarter, we need to keep preparing it…”
Instead of killing the report, we look for ways to automate it. When it’s automated we don’t mind that it continues on because it’s just noise in the background – it’s not wasting our time anymore. Sometimes this is miscategorised as efficiency (lol), but it’s really just noise.
We can all live with that I guess.
But along comes AI, and now the problem scales.
Previously, the people asking for reports (eg managers, clients, other departments) had actually thought about they needed.
Now people don’t even think. They just ask ChatGPT what reports they should create – and blindly take the ‘advice’ as if it were good.
We’re starting to see these requests come in: “Can you create these six reports in HubSpot please” and they list off a bunch of reports. The list is a mix of:
- already existing out of the box reports (ie easy to provide), combined with
- confusing report requests that make no sense (ie waste of time).
When we drill deeper and ask them why they need the report, they’ll unashamedly (and often proudly) state “I asked ChatGPT and this is what ChatGPT said were the reports I needed to create for running my business/department.”
We’ve outsourced our thinking and don’t even bother to sanity check the ‘insights’ we get back.
I’m not quite sure how to respond to this…
It’s great if you sell reporting tools, especially based on a consumption model, but it’s not great if you’ve got to waste time building (and maintaining) these reports for your business (or team or client) when deep down you know they’re providing zero value.
This is reporting slop and you should probably prepare for a deluge of it.
