AI adoption at work is broad but shallow

Economists have taken another stab at assessing the impact of generative AI adoption on different occupations and have found that adoption is broad but not very deep. While generative AI reaches 80 percent of occupations and more than 40 percent of tasks, in most of these occupations fewer than half of workers adopt it. …

[BoHu]

"What Work Does [the Dishwasher] Do?"

Perty much comes right smack down to what one'd expect imho, from their Table 1 (page 17 of "paper [PDF]" TFA link). Basically, you're in the top 10 of users if you're a dishwasher maker or repairperson (here: IT person), or if your job requires massive doses of creative hallucinations (PR, finance, CEO, market research).

On the other hand, you're in the bottom 10 of users if your job actually entails preparing dishes, or washing stuff (janitor, maid, fast food artist, animal caretaker, ...).

The takeaway seems to be that the Artificially-SuperHuman Intelligent Tech (A-SHIT) ain't quite ready for any sort of prime time as of yet, iiuc. Like early automobiles, it needs either a mechanically-inclined chauffeur to run it in any useful and safe way, some tinkering toymaker like Georges Bouton, a deep-pocketed marquis of the Jules-Albert de Dion kind, or both, ATM. The rest are openclawed YOLO daredevil flying jackass Acme circus barnstormers afaics!

Scaling the tech up for mass-production and dissemination seems rather premature at this point, imho.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "What Work Does [the Dishwasher] Do?"

Thus the researchers argue it's at least as important to understand why some workers adopt AI and some don't as it is to understand which tasks it can handle.

Looking at what kind of people work with AGI (and push their slop on everybody), I think I can answer that question...

• People who are lazy and love "somebody else" to do their work for them, which they then can present as theirs
• Intelligently challenged, taking the result that rolls out of AGI, don't have the capacity to check if it actually is any good/ true/ correct, but still sending it out in the world with a "look how good this is/ I am".

Perhaps the end conclusion should be that the base for folks being able to use AGI as a useful tool is much, MUCH smaller than AGI companies would like us to believe? Then again, the real opportunity is of course to replace all that pesky, expensive, human personnel, reduce your cost and increase your margin. Tried the helpful "Customer Service AI Assistant" of Dell recently?

[Pascal Monett]

"fewer than half of workers use it"

Which is already too much.

[Clausewitz4.1]

Re: "fewer than half of workers use it"

They use it because the managers are being pressed by company owners/stakeholders to shove AI down their throats.

Because of IPO and big investments already made, without good ROI in the horizon.

AI has good use cases, though. But not trillion-dollar companies.

[Jedit]

"They use it because the managers ... shove AI down their throats"

Which is also why the adoption is so broad on the company level. All these businesses are trying to get their staff to use AI whether they need to or not. The adoption on the worker level is so shallow because they don't need it. There couldn't be a clearer indicator that AI is a Buzzword Bullshit Bingo product with no actual use.

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple test

The higher percentage of AI use by management, the poorer that group are at their actual job.

[pimppetgaeghsr]

We'll find a problem for the solution eventually.

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jobs

AI needs a Steve Jobs to show how to use it.

Or if no one can… maybe there’s simply a big hype bubble where AI doesn’t actually meet expectations.

I suspect that a lot of IT roles are going to become “implement AI for task xxx”. Let’s face it, getting LLMs to do something reliably is pretty complex. More complex than building a traditional tool for users….

[IGotOut]

Most have it...

...but don't use it.

Let's see CoPilot in everything MS make, you do simple task, and now SuperClippy forced upon you.

A basic Google search automatically makes you an AI user.

You open a photo and suddenly AI has "Improved it"

So it could be titled "AI is forced upon people and most don't want it"

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids

Don’t inhale