Has using AI required you to do more work?
In the early stages of implementation, Kelly Jones, Cisco’s chief human resources officer, told Business Insider that the “worst thing” a company looking to accelerate AI adoption could do was impose additional work on employees who have free time.
“One of the most important things when entering the field of AI experimentation is to not kill innovation once you start it,” Jones said.
Jones touches on the reality of AI implementation in many companies. Even though companies report increased productivity with AI tools, employees aren’t necessarily working fewer hours.
One Microsoft manager previously told Business Insider that AI tools have reduced his coding time, which was the overwhelming majority of his workload, by 70%, but his overall workload hasn’t decreased. Many leaders also say that AI frees up employee time to focus on more “deep work,” rather than implying that employees may have more free time overall.
Jones said as leaders drive the adoption of AI, they need to make it “really relevant” to employees’ daily work, rather than a new request from their bosses. This should be positioned as a tool to help employees reclaim part of their day, the CPO said.
Most employees would want to save time at work, but companies get it wrong by saying, “Here are three new things we want you to do,” she said.
While the traditional 9-to-5 work schedule may not be overhauled, some employees are finding ways to use AI tools to shave hours off their schedules and free up time for other things, whether they tell their employers or not. For example, one employee told Business Insider that he used AI to complete about half of his software engineering tasks and spent the rest of the day on Reddit and YouTube.
Even if employees are doing better work in less time, “that’s not a negative,” Jones said. At this point in the innovation cycle, people should use AI wherever possible to get work done faster, she said.
Jones opposed automatically adding extra food to employees’ plates, but said figuring out what to do with the reclaimed time is a more complex issue. It’s HR’s job to decide how work changes, how it should be reallocated, and how companies and employees make calls. likely to focus on It will take the next year or two, she said.
“We’re really at a precipice, moving from managing jobs to redesigning jobs,” Jones said.
He said the role of HR will shift to helping organizations understand what jobs are assigned to humans, what jobs are done by AI, and how the two work together.
