The Editing Tax: Why AI 'Saves Time' Until It Doesn't — And How to Reduce Rework

There's a version of AI-assisted work that looks like this: the draft arrives in 90 seconds, someone spends 40 minutes fixing it, and the team walks away concluding that AI "mostly works." That 40 minutes doesn't usually appear in any productivity calculation. It doesn't show up in case studies about AI ROI. But it's real, it compounds across every person on the team, and in many organisations it quietly erases most of the time that AI was supposed to save. Call it the editing tax.