Execs Claim AI Makes Work More Productive. Polls Show Workforces Disagree Strongly

CEOs and other senior executives, seeing the premium their stock prices - and bonuses - can get from claiming they are all in on AI are embracing it with a roar. Even though as many as 50% in some polls show that they have realized no financial benefit from it so far.

And part of the reason for that is the workforces who are actually struggling to figure out how to make it work are finding that at this stage of its development, time saved is frequently wiped out by the need for correcting errors, finding out why something didnt track the way they thought it would - or because it screws up some other part of the process no one anticipated. Some are even calling it 'The AI Productivity Tax.' The reality seems to be that the process of adopting AI in order to make work more profitably and productively could take years or longer, as it has for previous technologies. JL

Lindsay Ellis reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Business leaders’ faith in the productivity-boosting powers of AI is getting a reality check—from their own workforces. 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. A new report from the software company Workday calls frustrations with the technology an “AI tax” on productivity. 85% of employees surveyed reported saving hours a week using AI, (but) much of the time was offset by having to correct errors and rework AI-generated content. (And) More than half of CEOs polled worldwide said they have seen no significant financial benefit so far.

Business leaders’ faith in the productivity-boosting powers of AI is getting a reality check—from their own workforces.

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. 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.

The gulf between senior executives’ and workers’ actual experience with generative AI is vast, according to a new survey from the AI consulting firm Section of 5,000 white-collar workers.

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.

Executives “automatically assume AI is going to be the savior,” said Steve McGarvey, a user-experience designer in Raleigh, N.C. “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, 53 years old, said 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. He said he has spent several sessions explaining to an AI bot why a proposed solution won’t work.

“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 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.

 

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.

Some of the challenge is the uncertainty over what AI can do well or poorly, said Dan Hiester, a 44-year-old user-experience engineer in Seattle. Over the summer, Hiester turned to a large language model to fix some code, expecting that it would take less than a half-hour. It wound up taking the entire afternoon, he said. Meanwhile, another task that would have taken Hiester days in the past took him 20 minutes with generative AI. 

“It’s done a complete reset of my understanding of how to estimate the time it takes to do something,” Hiester said.

Whatever changes AI is bringing to business operations and jobs, chief executives said that isn’t translating to the bottom line yet. In a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of chief executives presented at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this 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.

Some companies have already reported ambitious AI efforts that later required humans to help. The payment provider Klarna leaned on AI in 2024 to replace the work of hundreds of outsourced customer service agents. Later, the company pivoted again, hiring about a dozen human gig workers to answer more-challenging queries.

Payment provider Klarna replaced customer-service agents with AI but ended up hiring some human workers. Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News

At Duolingo, the language-learning app, Chief Executive Luis von Ahn told staff in a memo last year that it would “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle.”

He later said that he expected to keep hiring but that AI would “accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality.” The company wound up with a 14% higher head count year over year, von Ahn wrote on LinkedIn.

Six of 10 respondents to a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll last summer characterized AI and other new technologies as mostly a threat to the U.S. economy because of its potential to replace well-paid workers. The rest said they believed it would lead to new products and higher productivity.

 

“People are skeptical,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) said at a recent Washington, D.C., event focused on preparing the American workforce for AI. Broad-based efforts to support workers in getting AI training would help make them more willing to learn and use the technology, he said.

“If industry earns public trust in AI from workers, adoption will increase and the companies will reap the productivity increases,” Kelly said.