With artificial intelligence being used widely in the workplace, one of the main concerns is that businesses will try to use it to reduce labor costs, endangering the jobs of employees.
However, a recent study from Microsoft MSFT, +0.59% indicates that employees are just as keen as businesses to implement AI in the workplace.
According to the 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report, 75% of knowledge workers—those who deal with information instead of physical labor—use artificial intelligence (AI) in their work. 90% of workers who use AI at work claim it helps them save time, 85% claim it helps them concentrate on their more crucial tasks, and 84% claim it fosters greater creativity.
“Workers are using AI at work secretly in order to become more efficient, and that connects with this incentive for workers,” said Dan Schawbel, an author and a managing partner at Workplace Intelligence, a research and thought leadership agency. “There’s more pressure on workers. There’s less job stability. The incentive for a worker to offset the demands of productivity using AI has never been greater.”
“A big reason why workers are turning towards AI is because they are burned out,” Schawbel told MarketWatch. “There’s only 24 hours in a day, and you can only stretch somebody so much before you need advancements in technology.”
The report, which uses the lighthearted acronym BYOAI — bring your own artificial intelligence — found that 68% of people say they struggle with speed and volume at work, and 46% say they feel burned out.
“These findings align perfectly with how our brains manage the trade-offs between routine task execution and innovation — different kinds of thinking supported by two distinct but interacting neural networks in the brain,” Michael Platt, a neuroscientist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the report. “When we’re constantly switching, we don’t work as well. AI can help liberate workers from menial work and enable innovation and creativity to flourish.”
As they attempt to lighten their workload, employees harnessing the power of AI may also be making themselves more attractive to employers.
While many experts and the Microsoft report suggest that employees are interested in using AI in the workplace, it isn’t a one-sided push. Companies are happy to see workers embracing AI, too.
“Companies are creating incentives for employees to adopt it,” Schawbel said. “If you are adaptive and really great at using AI, you are becoming more valuable, because your output is higher. If you have those skills, you’re more likely to be successful.”
He described an employee who knows how to use AI as being able to multiply their productivity. “You may be hiring one person, but that one person has the productivity of two people,” he said. “It’s being driven top down and bottom up.”
According to the workplace trend report, 66% of leaders say they wouldn’t hire a worker without some kind of AI aptitude, and 71% say they would prefer to hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced one without AI skills.
Microsoft uses AI as much as any company in the world and has invested more than $10 billion into OpenAI.
The study was conducted by independent research firm Edelman Data & Intelligence from Feb. 15 to Mar. 28, 2024, and included the responses of 31,000 full-time or self-employed workers. The survey was constructed in association with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, according to the report’s methodology.
