What we're hearing: AI is helping workers offload time-consuming menial tasks, and handling some complex work better than humans.

• Jason Rabinowitz, head of content creation at airline retailing firm ATPCO, told Axios that days of translating airline marketing content has been reduced to "about two hours" with AI's help in handling complex workflows and multiple spreadsheets.
• Rabinowitz also described pitting AI-translated materials against human-translated versions in a blind trial — and finding that, so far, the AI-translated versions are "more readable and more accurate."

Reality check: Generative AI models suffer from "hallucinations" — techspeak for making stuff up.

• AI's work needs to be checked, and that process is sometimes more time-consuming than not using AI at all.
• And there remains the perennial concern among workers that generative AI will take people's jobs.

By the numbers: About one in six U.S. workers say they're using AI to do at least some of their work, per a recent Pew survey, while another 25% say AI could do at least part of their jobs.

• 52% of workers are worried about AI's impact, while 32% say it'll reduce job opportunities.

• Yet 36% say they're optimistic about AI's potential.

The big picture: AI's value comes down to how it's used, says Alexia Cambon, senior director, research at Microsoft.

• There's a "command-approach" and "conversation-based approach," which requires critical thinking and is the best way to use AI at work, Cambon says.

The other side: Ed Zitron, CEO of PR agency EZPR and prominent AI skeptic, argues that many corporate leaders are pushing AI despite being too disconnected from their companies' day-to-day work to understand its actual use.

• "What I think we're seeing is the biggest mask-off in corporate history, of bosses that do not know what they're talking about, that do not touch their businesses, shoving ChatGPT and other generative AI into everything because they don't know how anything works," Zitron says.