NEW YORK–A new report on the disconnect between business leaders and workers when it comes to the productivity-boosting power of artificial intelligence likely offers some insights to credit union leaders, as well.
“Employees say AI isn’t saving them much time in their daily work so far, and many report feeling overwhelmed by how to incorporate it into their jobs,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which noted companies, meanwhile, are spending vast amounts on artificial intelligence, betting that the technology’s power to speed everything from sales to back-office functions will usher in a new era of efficiency and profit growth.
Citing new research, the Journal said the gulf between senior executives’ and workers’ actual experience with generative AI is “vast.” The new survey from the AI consulting firm Section of 5,000 white-collar workers found that two-thirds of nonmanagement staffers said they saved less than two hours a week or no time at all with AI. More than 40% of executives, in contrast, said the technology saved them more than eight hours of work a week, the survey found.
‘Completely Wrong’
Executives “automatically assume AI is going to be the savior,” Steve McGarvey, a user-experience designer in Raleigh, N.C., told the Journal. “I can’t count the number of times that I’ve sought a solution for a problem, asked an LLM, and it gave me a solution to an accessibility problem that was completely wrong,” he said, referring to a large language model.
McGarvey further told the Journal that some specific use cases for AI—like using Perplexity as a research assistant—have saved him significant time. But part of his job is to ensure that visually impaired website users can access websites, and he said he has spent several sessions explaining to an AI bot why a proposed solution won’t work, the Journal said.
‘Could Really Do Harm’
“Unless you have some judgment or discernment in the field you’re in, you could really do harm to a consumer base—or do harm within a team—just by assuming” that whatever an LLM says is factual, he told the Journal.
The report said workers in the Section survey were far more likely to say they were anxious or overwhelmed about AI than excited—the reverse was true for the C-suite—and 40% of all respondents said they would be fine never using AI again. The most common way most people said they used AI tools was for basics like Google-search replacements or generating drafts. Far fewer used it for more-complex tasks like data analysis or code generation, according to the Journal.
‘An AI Tax’
Meanwhile, the Journal said a new report from the business-software company Workday goes so far as to call frustrations with the technology an “AI tax” on productivity. Though 85% of the roughly 1,600 employees it surveyed reported saving one to seven hours a week by using AI, much of the time was offset by having to correct errors and rework AI-generated content.
In addition, the Journal noted that in a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of chief executives presented at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last week, 12% said AI had delivered both cost and revenue benefits. More than half of the nearly 4,500 CEOs polled worldwide said they have seen no significant financial benefit so far.
