Artificial intelligence capabilities are developing rapidly and companies globally are frantically trying to keep up and implement AI tools, but there are consequences to sloppy execution.

In fact, 79% of companies globally expect to incur an “AI debt” as a result of poorly implemented autonomous tools, according to a new report by Asana on the State of AI at Work which surveyed over 9,000 knowledge workers across the U.S., U.K., Australia, Germany, and Japan.

The report highlighted that companies are unprepared and lack the infrastructure and oversight required to foster a smooth collaboration between human employees and autonomous AI agents. Differing from generative AI, agents act independently, can initiate actions, and recall previous work they performed. Some examples include OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s Claude.

AI debt is the cost of not implementing nascent autonomous systems correctly, Mark Hoffman, an expert at Asana’s Work Innovation Lab, told CNBC Make It.

“Those costs could be money costs. They could also be lost time, which relates to money. It could also be a lot of things that you have to undo, which is costly from a financial standpoint. It burns people out to have to do it. It’s all of the costs associated with poor implementation,” Hoffman said.

The report outlined that the debt could manifest as security risks, poor data quality, low impact AI agents which will waste time and resources for human employees, and a management skills gap.

Hoffman said this is not an exhaustive list and the “debt” could look like a bunch of code created by AI that doesn’t work right or AI-generated content that nobody is using.

New research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab even found that 40% of desk workers in the U.S. have received AI-generated “workslop,” which the researchers defined as content that looks good but lacks any substance.