Sure, AI is speeding up work — it's also creating more
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AI might one day replace us all — for now though, humans still spend a lot of time cleaning up its mess, according to a Workday survey released Wednesday.
Why it matters: The promise of AI is that it makes work more productive, but the reality is proving more complex and less rosy.
Zoom in: For employees, AI is both speeding up work and creating more of it, finds the report conducted by HR software company Workday last November.
- 85% of respondents said that AI saved them 1-7 hours a week, but about 37% of that time savings is lost to what they call "rework" — correcting errors, rewriting content and verifying output.
- Only 14% of respondents said they get consistently positive outcomes from AI.
- Workday surveyed 3,200 employees who said they are using AI — half in leadership positions — at companies in North America, Europe and Asia with at least $100 million in revenue and 150 employees.
Reality check: The report did not specify which AI products respondents were using or which companies built them.
Zoom out: "There is a big productivity paradox," Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product at Workday, tells Axios.
- The most frequent users of AI, he says, are the ones investing the most time in reviewing and correcting what it produces.
- The findings line up with other studies that call AI productivity gains into question — from MIT and Harvard Business Review.
- The term "workslop" has caught on for a reason.
Friction point: Typically, the better someone gets at using a technology, the more efficient they become. But with AI, as you get more proficient, you start to understand more about the ways in which the tech can go wrong, Kazmaier says.
- He points to people who might run the same prompts across multiple AI models — and check the outcomes against each other.
The big picture: CEOs and employers are super eager to reap the productivity benefits of AI — particularly so they can bring down labor costs.
- But for now, AI is mainly being used as an excuse to conduct layoffs that are due to other factors, says Rob Hornby, co-CEO of consultancy AlixPartners.
- In a survey from his firm, also out Wednesday, 95% of CEOs said they expected to conduct layoffs in the next five years because of AI. That's likely more hope than reality. CEOs aren't yet seeing productivity gains from AI, he says.
Yes, but: There are some productivity benefits to AI in some specific niche areas, like some types of low-level commoditized writing, he says. But overall, "we're having a tough time proving out real productivity benefits," Hornby says.
- Plus: AI tools are rapidly getting better at doing real-world work, so the problem could soon resolve itself. Anthropic's new tool designed to automate rote office tasks was created in less than 1.5 weeks and the code was written entirely by AI.
Between the lines: Incorporating and using a new technology effectively simply takes a lot of time — ask anyone who lived through the advent of the Internet.
- It takes time for employees to learn new tools, for employers to integrate them and for businesses to build products that actually make them useful.
- Workday and other enterprise tech firms are trying to sell AI-based software products to solve that latter piece.
The bottom line: AI is creating a productivity paradox — speeding up work, while quietly adding more of it.
