The research I have been doing for my next book--Brain Rush--suggests people are afraid generative AI will cost them their jobs. However, that fear is not widely shared. For example, a 2023 Pew survey revealed only 18 percent of people had used ChatGPT, and most people "were relatively unconcerned about the impact of AI on jobs--especially their own," according to Forbes.
Recent studies suggest generative AI is yielding the highest payoff for companies by supplementing the efforts of workers--rather than replacing them. For example, MIT researchers found that decision-makers will weigh the cost of installing the technology and changing work processes against the benefits of replacing the worker.
MIT's Worker Replacement calculus
For now, the decision calculus favors keeping workers. "There's definitely going to be an initial push," said Neil Thompson, director of the FutureTech research project at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory told the Boston Globe. "But then we should expect a more measured rollout of it." For the time being, "humans are a more cost-efficient way" to get the job done, he added.
MIT researchers based their conclusion on a 2020 to 2023 study of 420 tasks where an AI system with machine vision had the potential to replace human workers. The researchers surveyed task experts who estimated how much cost AI would save the company if the technology replaced the workers. An example is bakers--who spend about six percent of their time visually inspecting the bread they're baking. Current machine vision systems cost too much "to justify cutting labor costs by just 6 percent," noted the Globe.
The potential cost savings from generative AI vary depending on the task. Harvard Business School professor Joseph Fuller told the Globe that generative AI creates computer software so well that it will reduce demand for human programmers. Fuller pointed out the ease of training a large language model to code--just feed it a large number of computer programs. By contrast, he said there is no such training data on the accuracy of complex manufacturing processes.
How generative AI boosts customer support productivity
In addition to coding, customer support is another area where the productivity benefits of generative AI are high. How so? A 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper presented the results of "nearly 5,200 customer support agents at a Fortune 500 software firm who gained access to a generative AI-based assistant in a phased rollout between November 2020 and February 2021," according to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
The generative AI tool made real-time recommendations to the support agents on how to respond to customer inquiries and provided links to company documents. Compared to a control group, workers assisted by the chatbot resolved 14 percent more issues per hour, completed conversations faster, and were a bit more successful in resolving problems. The chatbot boosted the productivity of the least experienced workers by 35 percent.
Erik Brynjolfsson, a SIEPR senior fellow, said this productivity boost was much higher than the 1 to 2 percent productivity gains companies typically obtain from new information technology. Brynjolfsson and his colleagues found these productivity gains sprang from the chatbot's identification--"by digesting millions of transcripts of service interactions"--and dissemination of tactics used by the most successful agents, SIEPR noted.
Customers were happier because their problems were resolved more quickly and support agents were less likely to resign. We don't know for sure why this occurred, but I would guess that it's more enjoyable to be in a job where the customers like you and you can solve customer problems faster," Brynjolfsson said. His conclusion was companies would benefit from using generative AI to augment "high-skilled workers so the system can continue to learn from them," he told SIEPR.
The Goldman Sachs perspective on generative AI productivity gains
A Goldman Sachs executive sees specific categories of workers enjoying big productivity gains in 2024. "In 2024, the pace of adoption is quickening for specific kinds of workers," Goldman Sachs managing director Krish Rangan told me in a January 23 interview.
He added, "A writer can provide a rough storyline and the AI will produce a first draft. The artist can say, 'I want to see the Bay Bridge in the style of Van Gogh.' There is rapid adoption for these applications."
Now is a good time for your workers to learn how to become more productive with generative AI. Only workers whose tasks AI can completely replace at a low cost have reason to fear for their jobs.
EXPERT OPINION BY PETER COHAN, FOUNDER, PETER S. COHAN & ASSOCIATES@PETERCOHAN
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