CEOs Say AI is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story. (msn.com) 66
Companies are spending vast sums on AI expecting the technology to boost efficiency, but a new survey from AI consulting firm Section found that two-thirds of non-management workers among 5,000 white-collar respondents say they save less than two hours a week or no time at all, while more than 40% of executives report the technology saves them upward of eight hours weekly.
Workers were far more likely to describe themselves as anxious or overwhelmed about AI than excited -- the opposite of C-suite respondents -- and 40% of all surveyed said they would be fine never using AI again. A separate Workday report of roughly 1,600 employees found that though 85% reported time savings of one to seven hours weekly, much of it was offset by correcting errors and reworking AI-generated content -- what the company called an "AI tax" on productivity.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of nearly 4,500 CEOs found more than half have seen no significant financial benefit from AI so far, and only 12% said the technology has delivered both cost and revenue gains.
Workers were far more likely to describe themselves as anxious or overwhelmed about AI than excited -- the opposite of C-suite respondents -- and 40% of all surveyed said they would be fine never using AI again. A separate Workday report of roughly 1,600 employees found that though 85% reported time savings of one to seven hours weekly, much of it was offset by correcting errors and reworking AI-generated content -- what the company called an "AI tax" on productivity.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of nearly 4,500 CEOs found more than half have seen no significant financial benefit from AI so far, and only 12% said the technology has delivered both cost and revenue gains.
The verdict is now clear (Score:5, Insightful)
CEOs can be profitably replaced by AI whereas the line workers not.
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This is unquestionably true.
It seems to me that these big tech CEOs are so divorced from reality, and so focused tickig the boxes that "the market" wants to see; which - with AI being extremely good at telling you what you want to hear without worrying overly about .. objective fact or reality... strikes me as "Yeah AI can do that job easy"
Re: The verdict is now clear (Score:1, Offtopic)
LLMâ(TM)s have legitimate useful business cases that can save employees hours.
Guess where LLM isnâ(TM)t being applied rapidly?
An LLM tha can scan a pdf and then either create database entries or an importable file that creates the database entries would save workers hours a week.
Think scan a pdf and import it into the ERP software database. Think scan a packing slip or order acknowledgement pdf and import it.
It isnâ(TM)t sexy it isnâ(TM)t ground breaking it can save small busin
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That is an absolutely terrible application for an LLM. There are, and have been, alternative approaches that are far more accurate, predictable, reliable, and less expensive. If you're using an LLM for that now, you are, without question, paying significantly more for worse results.
Think scan a packing slip or order acknowledgement pdf and import it.
When you say "scan a pdf"... there's at least a 60% chance that you, or someone at your organization, regularly prints out PDFs and runs them through a scanner because scanning is one of the steps in the data entry process they
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And as you note... those are all Solved Problems. Hell, they solved many of those problems back in the 60s and 70s with OMR, OCR, barcodes, "just mailing out a punched card" and other fun things that were mostly replaced with better OCR starting in the 1990s. You can literally get OCR-based extraction and routing in commercial products starting around $200. Not per month. One time, perpetual license. And if you go the open source route, free. Big Tech AI's only "improvement" on this model is making it more
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There are times when AI can do things that normal humans can't, at least not efficiently. But in their quest to make AI look like the new gold, corporate America and the world globalists are overselling it to the point where it becomes hated
On the other end, you have geniuses who think that they can put just 10% of their time & effort on their work, and toss the rest of it all to AI. What they miss is that companies too are looking for areas where that can be done, so that they don't need to hire th
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>answer unclear, ask again later
Re:The verdict is now clear (Score:4, Funny)
Seems like it'd be a huge cost savings. And frankly, AI is more ethical than a sociopath, so it's a win-win.
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Bubble bubble pop pop, bubble bubble pop.
The world is getting tired of all your AI slop.
The leaders all say it takes you to the top,
But once you see the numbers, your hopes and dreams will drop.
Vendors all say the revolution has begun,
The days of writing code are now all but done,
The battle for human hearts and minds is won,
Smart investors are gonna turn and run.
(composed without the use of AI)
Anyone want to add a few verses?
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The question is, what happens after the bubble pops? The toothpaste doesn't go back in the tube. The bubble popping is the short term, what is the world going to look like in 2035 when I still have a decade left before retirement, the tooling is stable, and Microsoft, Meta, Google etc have bought the scattered corpses of OpenAI, Anthropic etc.?
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CEOs can be profitably replaced by AI whereas the line workers not.
Not only CEOs - most managers are easily replaceable.
Keep pushing (Score:3)
AI Subsidies (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:New World Order. (Score:5, Interesting)
So you're saying, you can be easily replaced with AI.
AI is fantastic for doing things like summarizing points, doing things like booking appointments and following a preset of instructions with some variance.
It's also good for digging into things and getting research. It's also great at getting the mathematically most common opinion on almost any subject, but you need to be able to tell when it's making stuff up.
DEI would be I can't hire someone based on some quality not related to their skill, so need to hire the "most skilled" 'worker for that position, whatever that is.
Although I'm a chick, so I know from experience if I use my initials, I'll get more interviews than if I put my name, and modify nothing else on my resume, so I'm probably blatantly biased in favor of DEI because I have personal experience with it. If you believe it means something else, you really need to sit down and read it.
Done properly, it looks something like Blind Auditions [wikipedia.org] which many orchestras use to eliminate bias when interviewing candidates, so they can focus specifically on the quality of music each person makes. Orchestras went from 99% male to 50/50.
As always, depends on the work, AI like any other tool has its strengths and weaknesses. Knowing our propensity for busy work though, we're probably going to end up with job positions for AI prompt copy editing soon enough, making sure the prompts made for the AI are properly formatted to minimize the chance of hallucinations. It's the usual wheel of tech, we'll eliminate a bunch of jobs, lots of people will be out of work due to not using the new skill, and we pay a premium for that skill until we can boil it down until that skill doesn't matter anymore.
RE: DEI (Score:2)
Unfortunately, your comment that "as always, depends on the work" is the catch with all of what you described. It's awesome that a properly applied DEI hiring policy for orchestras resulted in a near 50/50 mix of male and female musicians performing symphonies. But that's also a situation where realistically, none of the "customers" (the people buying the tickets to hear performances) care about anything but the music that's being performed. Gender has nothing to do with that outcome.
Hiring the "most skill
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Unfortunately, your comment that "as always, depends on the work" is the catch with all of what you described. It's awesome that a properly applied DEI hiring policy for orchestras resulted in a near 50/50 mix of male and female musicians performing symphonies. But that's also a situation where realistically, none of the "customers" (the people buying the tickets to hear performances) care about anything but the music that's being performed. Gender has nothing to do with that outcome.
You vastly underestimate the competitiveness in the music space. Gender has nothing to do with the outcome is the point, if you evaluate on skill alone you get a mix of people. There's also the change in who gets training and skill, a skilled musician often has to practice for 5-6 hours a day to stay sharp. See Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" for examples of this kind of thing. There's a reason we don't have many good hockey players born in June, for example. There's sometimes other reasons.
Hiring the "most skilled" person for a given job is often more of a "mushy" dance around finding the best possible combination of hard skills and at least some of the things you're not allowed to say you're *really* looking for. For example, I've worked at marketing companies before and their top performing salespeople creating new leads and/or closing deals are universally physically attractive and mostly younger. It would be a lie to pretend that's just coincidence.
As someon
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Unfortunately, your comment that "as always, depends on the work" is the catch with all of what you described. It's awesome that a properly applied DEI hiring policy for orchestras resulted in a near 50/50 mix of male and female musicians performing symphonies. But that's also a situation where realistically, none of the "customers" (the people buying the tickets to hear performances) care about anything but the music that's being performed. Gender has nothing to do with that outcome.
Hiring the "most skilled" person for a given job is often more of a "mushy" dance around finding the best possible combination of hard skills and at least some of the things you're not allowed to say you're *really* looking for. For example, I've worked at marketing companies before and their top performing salespeople creating new leads and/or closing deals are universally physically attractive and mostly younger. It would be a lie to pretend that's just coincidence.
The point of "blind auditions" was to get rid of unconscious bias and measure solely on merit. We say we want the best musicians, but we're distracted by appearances for some reason. The blind audition is fully defensible as a best practice without reference to any part of the DEI conversation. And I'm glad that the people who make the best-sounding music get the job, period, full stop. I do laugh, though, at seeing the advertising posters for upcoming concerts. When there's a young female classical ar
Re:New World Order. (Score:4, Insightful)
> DEI would be I can't hire someone based on some quality not related to their skill, so need to hire the "most skilled" 'worker for that position, whatever that is.
That's not what DEI is, no.
Please stop repeating right wing propaganda.
DEI is merely about ensuring that qualified people do not have artificial barriers in front of them preventing them from applying or getting through the application process because of their sex/gender, "race", sexuality, etc.
DEI is literally about making sure only the persons qualifications matter.
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While people that actually know me and me skill responded that those companies are idiots.
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Right, so I wouldn't let someone through just because sex/gender, "race", sexuality, etc. because that is a quality not related to their skill.
I need to hire the person who is the most skilled for the position, based on whatever criteria I have.
It's funny, I wasn't trying to mirror the propaganda, but the propaganda has gone so far it circles back to "DEI is bad, you should hire based on merit" which is the whole point of having DEI in the first place, since we have a long history of not hiring on merit at
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Re: New World Order. (Score:2)
Re: New World Order. (Score:1)
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What They're REALLY Saying (Score:3)
What the CEOs are really saying is that AI is making THEIR work more efficient. And since CEOs are just like normal people, AI must be making everyone's work more efficient too. After all, no one has every accused a CEO of being myopic.
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If CEO's report bullshit to investors, they're committing a crime. It's not like when they murder or poison people either -- these crimes are actually prosecuted. Money and position won't protect you when your victims are other wealthy and powerful people.
unpopular opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Two observations:
1. AI amplifies existing competence. Current AI systems are not autonomous problem-solvers -- they are accelerants. Users who already understand their domain can spot errors, ask better follow-up questions, and integrate outputs efficiently. For less experienced or less analytical workers, AI often creates rework rather than savings, which is consistent with the “AI tax” described in the surveys.
It’s not strictly about being “smart,” but also about task structure and feedback loops. Some highly capable workers are in environments where AI cannot be safely or efficiently applied (compliance-heavy workflows, fragmented tooling, high-stakes accuracy requirements).
2. Impact varies strongly by role, as knowledge work is not homogeneous. Roles involving synthesis, drafting, ideation, coding, analysis, or decision support benefit far more than roles dominated by coordination, approvals, interpersonal judgment, or rigid process constraints. Executive workflows are especially well suited to AI assistance, which explains the perception gap between leadership and individual contributors.
Also, adoption maturity matters. Many organizations have introduced AI without training, workflow redesign, or incentives, which predictably limits upside regardless of worker capability. Would it be exactly surprising to see this outcome? Not to me.
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Accelerants? Nonsense. I've found that while users often report increased productivity, this generally isn't supported by objective measures. AI use among actually competent users tend to drop off over time as they notice that they avoid doing tasks with "assistance" when pressed for time.
thought experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
So let’s say you work at a company, and they have an OKR “use AI to improve productivity”. If you aren’t familiar with OKRs, they are something that your manager tells you to do, and the more of them you do the more likely you are to get a raise, or bonus, or at least keep your job. Sometimes they are flat out assigned to you, sometimes you get to pick off a list, sometimes you and your manager come up with them together. You manager likely has an OKR handed down to them to get their employees to use more AI, so this isn’t a pure blue sky thought experiment. It is a realistic situation.
So you end up with this OKR. You can ignore it and at the end of performance cycle you can either fess up “I didn’t even try”, or you can say “I gave it a shot and AI didn’t help”, or you can flat out lie “AI helped some”, or “AI helped a lot”. Which do you do? Which do you do if you were also pretty lazy on the other OKRs and really have almost nothing good to report? If you aren’t lazy yourself you already know any OKR with no real way to double check is something you report having achieved because you were too lazy to do any of ‘em.
If you aren’t lazy you have a bunch of OKRs that you actually managed to do (get 90% of TPS reports in on time, screen all your bugs at least twice a week, whatever). You also likely have a few you didn’t, and you have this one here. Maybe you didn’t bother with AI which gives you the chouces up above in “lazy”, or maybe you gave it a shot and it didn’t help, so you can report a failure, but you worked so hard on the other OKRs, do you really want to jeopardize your bonus because you have this AI OKR?
If you are super honest maybe you will report the AI OKR as a bust. Maybe your company actually has a “if you aren’t failing at least 20% of your OKRs you didn’t set high enough expectations” policy, and sure you can pass or fail some number of the unverifiable OKRs as needed to hit that magic success rate...but that is rare, it is far more common for a company to treat OKRs as “more is better!”.
Plus even if you are fundamentally an honest person, I’m sure you used AI once or twice to summarize someone else’s long emails into something shorter and maybe inaccurate, but surly that saved time, right? At least as long as they weren’t too inaccurate! Or maybe you used it to fluff up a short email/report into something longer, even if you then spent just as long double checking that it isn’t now inaccurate as you would have fluffing it up yourself (plus now everyone else ends up with longer emails they use AI to summarize...). Or you write code for a living, and you AI’ed up some code, and that saved you like 10 hours of coding, I mean it cost 45 hours of extra debugging, but you saved 10 hours somewhere, so you can report meeting your OKR without a lie!
If you are asked by someone outside your management chain, and outside your company the honest answer is somewhere between “I didn’t try”, to “it didn't help”, to “it saved me time in one place, but maybe cost me more in another place”, and occasionally “yeah it was helpful somewhere"
So workers are reporting “yeah, AI makes me more productive” up the management chain because that makes rewards flow back down the management chain. Which makes CEO’s think “this shit works!”, I mean it is exacerbates the problem of upper management job being the kind of thing AI can do anyway, of taking in a ton of data and making choices without understanding what the fuck is really going on anyway, so CEO’s already see AI “working” and they are inclined to believe it, especially when their whole management chain reports it as working...
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"So letâ(TM)s say you work at a company, and they have an OKR 'use AI to improve productivity'. If you arenâ(TM)t familiar with OKRs, they are something that your manager tells you to do, and the more of them you do the more likely you are to get a raise, or bonus, or at least keep your job. Sometimes they are flat out assigned to you, sometimes you get to pick off a list, sometimes you and your manager come up with them together. You manager likely has an OKR handed down to them to get their empl
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"you already know any OKR with no real way to double check is something you report having achieved because you were too lazy to do any of ‘em."
BINGO. Also, in this hypothetical company, say the OKR says do something 10% better in the current reporting period. You have no incentive to do any better than 10%, because that OKR will still apply during the next reporting period, in which you'll have to eek out another 10%. You might have a way to do 50% better (say, reduce cost of infrastructure) but you c
OKR stands for Objectives and key results (Score:2)
Surprise... (Score:2)
How much longer would it have taken? (Score:2, Insightful)
Assuming there was no AI, how long would it have taken these people to create whatever it is they used AI for? For example, if creating the spreadsheet would take 3 hours, but using AI it only took 15 minutes plus an additional hour to correct errors, that is still a net saving of almost 2 hours.
For reworking content, how long would it have taken them to come up wi
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My fear is that we are in a sort of interstitial bubble with this stuff. Right now, we have smart people who can possibly use these tools to save some time. As you say, take 15 minutes to generate and spend an hour correcting errors, vs taking 3 hours to do the thing by hand.
But what happens a few years from now when people who have the ability to spot those errors are "left behind" and there isn't anyone left to realize what the thing gave you is slop? I keep seeing it over and over where people are jus
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For example, if creating the spreadsheet would take 3 hours, but using AI it only took 15 minutes plus an additional hour to correct errors, that is still a net saving of almost 2 hours.
Here in reality, this is how it would go: It would take the user about an hour to get the AI to make something resembling the spreadsheet they want, 2 hours to give up trying to make all the necessary corrections, and 3 hours to just do the damn thing themselves. That's a net loss of 2 hours.
Now, I will grant that LLMs can have a multiplicative effect in an organization. For example: you use AI to quickly make a spreadsheet which you pass that along to a coworker or subordinate to 'check for errors and ma
CEOs live in their own bubble worlds (Score:1)
Remember watching some of Eric Schmidt's talks on AI and it was total cringe just listening to him. Over the years the meaningless buzzwords and shiny objects change yet through it all the one prevailing constant are clueless CEOs unencumbered by reality. Embarrassing this level of incompetence from leadership is even tolerated.
Summarizing workflows (Score:5, Insightful)
My director is extremely excited about how much time AI saves him writing up his weekly summaries to pass up the chain. He can write a single sentence, pass it to the AI to be written up into a big fancy report, the next guy up the chain uses another AI to decipher the big fancy report into a single sentence summary that may, or may not, be vaguely like the original sentence used to prompt the AI that wrote the big fancy report, and both of them are super pumped that they saved so much time. My director saved writing time, his next-up-the-chain saved the time of having to read what my director wrote. They've just used a bit more compute to avoid typing and reading things that were, at best, busywork created to make it seem as if they were involved in the process of what happens beneath them. AI can really help with busywork reporting.
I'm guessing neither of them will realize they're automating away the entire reason their jobs exist.
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That's an excellent comment - sorry, it was not recognized enough. :-)
Just proves the job of CEO is easy vs real work (Score:2)
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But we will always need the CEO position in companies. To satisfy the requirements of the Dilbert Principle [wikipedia.org].
Also, one must have meat-sack leadership to give credibility to judicial sentences like prison. You can't instill a sense of fear (or deterrence) in an AI. Since once thrown in prison, all one has to do is spin up another copy in the free world.
As expected (Score:1)
Early adopters of immature tech rarely have a smooth transition.
There will be a lot of confusion and wasted time as workers try to figure out how to use the tools and fix the mistakes the tools make.
This gets worse because the tools are rapidly evolving.
Changing a complex system is hard, slow and expensive.
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This gets worse because the tools are rapidly evolving.
Too rapidly. Of course, this is necessary to give the hucksters time to skip town.
I heard this story before (Score:3)
So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones.
The CEOs will Never Say (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember-- CEOs are not accountants. They're managers with the EXPRESS obligation to continually increase investment. They must always be in the process of encouraging people to buy their stock.
The major CEOs will never say, "I was too stupid. I was taken in by the promise of large language models thinking it was actual, Star-Trek-level artificial intelligence. We increased our software expenses by 20%, reduced our workforce headcount by 20%, and it hasn't paid off. In fact, we're significantly less financially stable today and our position to improve is weakened by the lack of capable workforce. Oops."
No. Instead, they say, "I was right. The gains are coming," while trying to manipulate the perception of their business.
Saving time? (Score:2)
As was noted, it might save 3-7 hours a week. This sounds like a big benefit. Except, a human then has to proof read and correct the output and, thus, offsetting the time saved.
An upside to this is that the human becomes more involved in the company business and, perhaps, a better employee if they learn something during the correction process.
For developers, AI can save a lot of time. The other night, I had it code an iOS app for an idea I've been working on. It entailed some detailed cryptographic and
So what's new? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's always been a massive gap between top and bottom levels at any workplace. The people at the top, the so self-proclaimed leaders, never have any clue of what's actually going on on the factory level.
It's also got to do with the fact that CEOs are the ultimate sales and marketing people. They don't tell you what is - they tell you what the dream is, so that they can sell vapourware to clients and investors. But it's just that - dreams.
There, in black and white (Score:3)
IoT (Score:2)
Why are we still talking about AI when what's really going to change the world is IPv6 and the Internet of Things! Your toaster, your blender, and even your knife will have IP addresses and be connected to the Internet.. You knife will tell you when it needs sharpening, your toaster will send a push notification when your toast is done, you will be able to remotely start your blender and have a smoothie waiting for you by the time you walk through the door... REMEMBER!??