Costly placebo
This is a PR puff piece dressed up as “research”.
First, 19 minutes a day is not productivity. It is noise. You could claw back more than that by letting people start at 10, avoiding peak commuting, or cancelling one standing meeting about another meeting. No AI required. Just basic adult management.
Second, the numbers are already wobbling. One government study says 26 minutes, another says 19, another says zero. That is not convergence. That is what happens when you measure vibes instead of outcomes. The only consistent result is “people felt nicer”, which is not the same thing as doing more useful work.
Third, the sample is cooked. Volunteers and nominees using shiny new tools always report gains. It is the Hawthorne effect with autocomplete. Statistical “adjustments” are not magic. They do not turn self-selection into causality.
Fourth, the tasks where Copilot “saves time” are exactly the ones civil servants should not be optimising blindly. Searching internal docs faster just means propagating outdated nonsense quicker. First-draft emails were never the bottleneck. Judgement, accountability, and decision-making were. Even the article admits the tool falls down the moment human judgement is required. That is the actual job.
Fifth, the cost-benefit is missing entirely. We are told minutes were saved, but not how much was paid per minute to a foreign, tax-optimised corporation. Billions leave the UK so staff can shave a few minutes off emails that probably should not exist in the first place. If the same department banned “reply all” and status updates, the gains would dwarf Copilot overnight.
Sixth, the risk is waved away. Every minute saved now comes with future minutes lost proving that sensitive government data was not inspected, retained, or subpoenaed under the US Cloud Act. That paperwork alone will eat the alleged gains for breakfast.
Finally, “comfort blanket” is the most honest phrase in the article, and not in the way it intends. Reducing stress by outsourcing thinking to a probabilistic text generator is not efficiency. It is sedation.
If Department for Work and Pensions wanted real productivity, it would fix workflows, kill pointless meetings, and stop confusing busyness with output. Instead, it bought licences from Microsoft, got a modest placebo effect, and called it transformation.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
