It’s hard to read the tea leaves on the future of work with AI. There are such wild extremes between the predictions of techno-utopian boosters and techno-dystopian doomers. It’s exciting and scary at the same time and no one really knows how this will go.
I keep coming back to HBS professor Karim Lakhani’s oft-quoted observation from last year:
“AI is not going to replace humans, but humans with AI are going to replace humans without AI.”
I’ve written a lot about the business adoption of Generative AI and the famous Gartner Hype cycle for emerging technology. In June, I spoke about this at Gartner’s CMO Symposium about the awkward adolescence of AI. We’re at a transition point as “The Peak of Inflated Expectations” gives way to “The Trough of Disillusionment.”
The Upwork Research Institute released a fascinating study a couple weeks ago on the current state of AI at work in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. The study illustrates the tension of this transition point.
The hype has been high:
“96% of C-suite leaders say they expect the use of AI tools to increase their company’s overall productivity levels. Already, 39% of companies in our study are mandating the use of AI tools, with an additional 46% encouraging their use.”
Yet the results in practice have been wanting:
“Nearly half (47%) of employees using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect, and 77% say these tools have actually decreased their productivity and added to their workload.”
In the meantime, I think it’s important to keep the conversation going about the nature of work itself. Productivity isn’t the only metric that matters.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
