Why business leaders see AI as a chance to make work more laborious

Gathered in AssetsAt the Brainstorm Tech conference on Wednesday, a panel of executives from corporations including Lenovo and McKinsey argued that, with appropriate controls, AI-powered tools could release employees to give attention to more “human” tasks.

“It takes the effort out of enjoying our work and allows us to have more joy in it,” says Lareina Yee, senior partner and chair of the Technology Council. “It can greatly increase individual productivity.”

A technological revolution

Since OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the general public in late 2022, executives and tech critics have been arguing concerning the guarantees of AI—and the risks to employees. While business leaders like San Francisco Reserve Chief Mary Daly argue that AI is “replacing tasks, not people,” fears of mass layoffs and replacements remain. The World Economic Forum has estimated that AI will replace around 85 million jobs by 2025.

On Wednesday, the panel of business leaders took an opposite stance, arguing that AI will result in unprecedented productivity gains for knowledge employees. Vijay Gopal, a digital workplace solutions manager at Lenovo, described AI as “the only chance we have as humanity to achieve perfection.”

AI can tackle tasks starting from summarizing meetings to updating legacy code, and it could actually also help employees with modern programming languages ​​like Python – a capability that Yee said could give employees back 20% of their workday. “How would you use that time differently?” she asked. “This is the first major technology shift that actually addresses knowledge work.”

Athena Karp, general manager at Workday, said AI could go even further by helping to eliminate workplace issues for workers, corresponding to bias. She pointed to the instance of recruiting, where an AI tool that scans resumes could eliminate human bias, corresponding to giving preference to applicants who went to the identical school or grew up in the identical hometown. “Bias in people is something you can’t control, but bias in technology is,” she said.

With the AI ​​adoption cycle still in its infancy, Karp said there is a big opportunity for corporations to rethink their internal processes – and put appropriate controls and governance in place. She added that 80% of the staffing organizations she works with don’t yet have an AI-focused product in place.

For Ali Akhtar, co-founder and CEO of software startup Letter AI, the technology is already here. He said that in interviews for software developers, he gives bonus points if the developers use their preferred AI copilot, which shows they’re already desirous about easy methods to use the tools to extend their productivity.

While concerns remain concerning the flaws still inherent in generative AI products, Akhtar compared the considering to self-driving cars, where products have to perform 10 or 100 times higher than humans to realize acceptance. “How much better does AI have to be for us to forgive it for any mistakes it may make?” he asked, adding that use cases will expand as large language models proceed to enhance.

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