New research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab found that 40% of U.S. desk workers encountered AI “workslop” in the past month. Workslop is defined as polished outputs that read well but contain errors that derail real work.
Cleanup averages two hours per incident, costing roughly $186 per worker per month—or about $9 million annually for a 10,000-employee company. The reputational cost is even higher: recipients judged senders of AI-generated workslop as 42% less trustworthy and 37% less intelligent, which helps explain why an MIT Media Lab survey found 95% of organizations see no measurable ROI on AI investments.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Teams are producing more content than ever, but much of it feels hollow, generic, or off-brand—a quiet productivity leak that erodes credibility. The problem isn’t the model. It’s the absence of oversight.
Our 5 step audit can show whether your AI program is improving your strategy or quietly adding to the noise.
STEP 1: Prompt Hygiene
Start where all AI chaos begins: the prompt. Are your teams documenting the exact instructions used for campaigns, or does everyone have a personal library of half-remembered cues? Standardize your best performers and label them by channel, tone, and objective. Treat prompts like templates, not hunches. It’s the only way to ensure your next “inspired” output doesn’t sound like it came from another company entirely.
STEP 2: Brand Voice Match
Run a simple comparison test. Take a recent AI-generated paragraph and place it beside copy from your website or brand manifesto. If the tone, rhythm, or confidence level feels off, the model has drifted.
Refine its instructions until both read as if written by the same person. Consistency builds trust faster than any algorithmic tweak ever could.
STEP 3: Fact Integrity
Generative AI will happily invent data with total confidence. Pick any three claims in your last AI-assisted draft and trace them back to a source. If you can’t confirm each one, neither can your readers.
False precision is still false, and in finance and fintech marketing, even small factual errors can undo years of credibility.
STEP 4: SEO and AI Visibility
Search itself is changing. In tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini, your brand could already appear or be completely invisible.
Here’s how to check: Paste a few of your recent headlines or FAQs into these systems and check the results.
Are you part of the synthesized summaries or absent altogether? Visibility in AI-powered discovery engines is the new SEO.
Knowing where you stand now is half the strategy.
STEP 5: Compliance Sanity Check
Every AI-generated asset still needs to pass the same compliance review as anything else. Always verify disclaimers, footnotes, and disclosures remain intact after edits or rewrites. Better yet, standardize them and paste them in after the writing.
If the system’s “creativity” quietly removes them, your workflow has a hidden liability. Automation is only efficient when it’s also accountable.
The Real Metric: Trust
While AI can expand your reach, only human oversight protects your reputation.
The most successful financial marketers will be those who treat AI is less of a megaphone than a mirror, reflecting brands that are already disciplined, recognizable, and credible.