New research from Oxford and Babson College warns that AI embedded across business processes is producing what the authors call “knowledge decay,” which may chip away at accuracy and trust, particularly in hiring.
Matthias Holweg, director of the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Program, and Thomas Davenport, a professor at Babson College, wrote about these findings this month in Harvard Business Review. “The overall impact of AI ‘augmenting’ each step is that it has sunk trust in the process to all-time lows for both job seekers and recruiters,” wrote the authors.
HR leaders know that AI can now be embedded into every stage of hiring, and candidates have adapted accordingly. However, the availability of new tools may actually obscure the ability of a candidate to perform (or not) the role for which they are applying. “What are we actually assessing here—how well a candidate fits the needs of the vacant role, how thoughtfully a company has defined the role or how well AI has been used at each step of the process?” wrote the authors.
Holweg and Davenport trace knowledge decay to what they call “slopification,” which occurs when individuals use AI to produce polished-looking, low-quality work and others in the same process chain stop checking as appropriate. The researchers sort the organizational damage into three categories: knowledge verification, knowledge validation and knowledge entropy.
Knowledge verification takes time, and when done properly, double-checking often erases the efficiency gains AI was supposed to deliver, pushing HR teams to schedule in-person, AI-free interviews just to sort out who is actually qualified. Knowledge validation is also a problem. “Human experts now have to justify not only the quality of the output submitted, but also that actual human intellectual work has produced it,” wrote the authors.
Underneath both of those pitfalls lies what the authors call knowledge entropy. Every time content passes through an AI tool, it drifts further from what was originally true, creating what they describe as “a risky AI-based game of telephone.”
Read more: Avoiding ‘work slop’, CHROs on accountability
How to get in front of these hiring risks
The authors recommend that when AI undermines the insights that HR is trying to capture, recruiters should restrict the format rather than the tool. Instead of open-format CVs, require structured questionnaires with specific, verifiable inputs such as projects led, budgets managed and team sizes led. They say these factors are harder to fabricate and easier to assess.
The authors say that organizations most at risk are those that allow AI to flow through the hiring steps without ever asking how it changes the output at the other end. More broadly, they urge leaders to evaluate AI’s impact on whole processes, not individual steps. A screening tool that speeds up one stage but creates more downstream verification problems should not be viewed as an efficiency gain. “The more we use generative AI in our business processes, the more we need to ensure that what we consider ‘knowledge’ is indeed deserving of that term,” wrote the authors.
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