AI may already be taking over the workplace, but the question remains whether the ever-growing technology will be a productivity opportunity or a displacement.
collected luckAt the Alliance of the Year's Brainstorm Tech conference on Wednesday, a panel of leaders from companies including Lenovo and McKinsey argued that, if used properly and with the right controls, AI-powered tools can help workers focus on more “human” tasks.
“It reduces the burden of work and increases the joy,” says Lareina Yi, senior partner and chair of the Technology Council. “It can really boost personal productivity.”
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Since OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT at the end of 2022, executives and tech commentators have clashed over AI's potential and risks to workers. Economic leaders such as Mary Daly, head of the San Francisco Reserve Bank, argue that AI will “replace tasks, not people,” but concerns remain about mass layoffs and replacements. The World Economic Forum estimates that AI will replace about 85 million jobs by 2025.
A panel of business leaders speaking Wednesday took the opposite stance, arguing that AI will bring unprecedented gains in knowledge worker productivity. Vijay Gopal, Lenovo's executive director of digital workplace solutions, described AI as “humanity's only chance of achieving perfection.”
AI can take over tasks from summarizing meetings to updating legacy code to even assisting employees with modern programming languages like Python. Yee says the role could give 20 percent of the workday back to employees. “What do you do with that time?” she asked. “This is the first big technology shift that's really addressing knowledge work.”
Athena Karp, general manager at Workday, said AI can also help address employee issues such as bias in the workplace. She cited hiring as an example, saying AI tools that scan resumes can remove inherent human biases, such as prioritizing applicants who went to the same school or grew up in the same hometown. “You can't manage human bias, but technology can,” she said.
Because we're still in the early stages of the AI adoption cycle, workplaces have a huge opportunity to not only rethink their internal processes but also implement proper management and governance, Karp said, adding that 80% of the hiring organizations he works with have yet to adopt AI-first products.
For Ali Akhtar, co-founder and CEO of software startup Letter AI, the technology is already here: When he interviews software engineers for jobs, he says he gives bonus points if the developer is using their favorite AI co-pilot, showing that they're already thinking about how they can leverage their tools to be more productive.
While concerns remain about errors that still plague generative AI products, Akhtar likened the idea to self-driving cars, which need to perform 10 or even 100 times better than humans to be accepted. “How good does the AI need to be to be tolerant of the mistakes it might make?” he asked, adding that use cases will expand as large-scale language models continue to improve.
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