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In my white paper on alignment agents, I argued that organizations need an alignment agent, for three reasons. One of the three is swamping.
To understand swamping, you need to understand “the pile.”
I bet these three things are true for you and everyone you know:
- AI makes it slightly easier to consume content, by summarizing, consolidating, and triaging.
- AI makes it significantly easier to create content.
- You and everyone you know are sharing that extra content.
If all these things are true, then everyone’s pile of unread content is growing faster than anyone can read it.
And this doesn’t even take into account the quality of that content. A year ago, 40% of workers said they had received “workslop” in the past month (Harvard Business Review, September 2025). I’d bet it’s 100% of knowledge workers now.
The pile slows each of us down. It slows the organization down even more, because the big decisions still need a human.
So your best people spend the day consuming instead of deciding. That is swamping.
I believe swamping is a core reason organizations aren’t seeing a return on AI yet. The St. Louis Fed read about 490,000 earnings-call transcripts: 95% of the sentences about AI and productivity are about future gains, not gains today.
