Making Users Productive with Gen AI

August 8, 2024

Written by Eric Krapf, General Manager and Program Co-Chair, Enterprise Connect Publisher

One of the fundamental questions about AI is: Can Generative AI deliver productivity improvements? And according to a recent survey, the short answer seems to be: No, AI can’t deliver productivity gains. It may enable productivity gains, but for these to materialize at scale, enterprises will have to put in the effort to make it happen.

The survey, from hiring website Upwork, found a dramatic gap between enterprise leaders’ views of AI productivity gains, and the realities that end users reported. According to Upwork, 96% of C-suite leaders “expect the use of AI tools to increase their company’s overall productivity levels.”

The problem is that almost half of employees said, “they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect,” Upwork reported. And that’s not the worst of it; 77% “say these tools have actually decreased their productivity and added to their workload.”

That shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Gen AI use cases tend to be much more ambitious than previous generations of AI. When spell-check tells you a word is misspelled, you don’t rush to a dictionary to make sure it’s correct about that; but if you ask a Gen AI assistant or chatbot to write you a report or set of code, you’ll likely take the time to review the results carefully to guard against hallucinations; you may even go back and check the sources it references. So we can expect some users to find Gen AI actually adds to the time it takes to complete certain tasks.

The good news is that employees aren’t resisting AI; Upwork found that 65% believe it has the potential to increase their productivity. But enterprises need to leverage employees’ willingness to engage with the technology, and provide better training. And we’re not just talking about prompt engineering. End users need to understand why they’re using a particular AI-enabled tool in the first place, so they can approach each task with a better idea of whether AI is even the right tool for the problem at hand. Which means that business leaders – and IT – need that clarity before they roll the tool out widely.

These survey numbers show that many enterprises haven’t come to grips with the question of where Gen AI adds value, and where the technology may not quite be ready for prime time. This conundrum will be a major focus of our Enterprise Connect AI event, Oct. 1 – 2 at the Santa Clara, CA, Convention Center. We’ve focused our program on practical issues around enterprise AI adoption and value, and we’ve got a whole track dedicated to AI & Productivity. I hope you can join us for two days of in-depth, objective, no-hype exploration of how you can make AI work for your enterprise.