Surprise! AI Isn't Taking Our Jobs, It's Making Them Worse

AI is causing employees more work, not less, as they try to keep up with unrealistic expectations.

According to a new study from the Upwork Research Institute, 96 percent of C-suite executives thought AI would "boost productivity." In reality, the employees forced to use that AI are struggling to realize those gains. The result? One-third of those surveyed plan to quit in the next six months. Who could have predicted this?

"C-suite executives often view AI as a plug-and-play solution for skyrocketing productivity, but they're missing the bigger picture. On the ground, we're seeing a massive skills gap. Nearly half of employees interfacing with AI are in the dark about leveraging it effectively," Luv Tulsidas, the CEO of Techolution, an AI consulting firm, told Lifewire via email.

Dream or Nightmare?

If you've been following the AI hype, then this will be no surprise to you. Every company is jumping on the train, either trying to cram AI features into their software product or dreaming that they can fire those pesky humans—who require breaks, time off, medical care—and replace them with the computer from Star Trek, which will be able to do the same job, only better.

Except, of course, it's not working like that. The reality is that AI software isn't at all intelligent. It's a tool like any other and one which needs to be used by humans. In the CEO's dream, those humans will be interchangeable minimal-wage drones, but even that fantasy is far off. According to the study, 81 percent of "global C-suite leaders" have increased productivity demands on their employees over the last year, resulting in the majority of those employees either feeling overwhelmed or burned out.

"[W]hile some jobs can be replaced by AI, particularly those that involve repetitive tasks and require less complex decision-making, many roles that involve higher-level cognitive functions, creativity, and human interaction are not likely to be replaced in the near future. Instead, AI will probably augment these roles, helping employees be more productive and efficient," Julián Núñez, co-founder and COO at payment technology company Yuno, told Lifewire via email.

Training

Let's take a more realistic scenario. Perhaps a salesperson has been given AI tools to help generate leads to follow up. Or they have to give the leads to the AI, and the AI does the dirty work. Whatever the case, there are two barriers here. One is that the human now has two jobs: their pre-existing sales job and a brand-new job, where they have to train or learn to use the AI. At the same time, the bosses at the top have bought into the promised productivity increases of this setup, and of course, they aren't seeing them.

"Initially, business leaders were excited about potential productivity gains, much like current AI enthusiasm. However, employees often struggled, facing a steep learning curve and feeling overwhelmed by the new technology," Carol Grunberg, chief business officer at Yuno, told Lifewire via email.

Then, there's the unpredictable nature of AI itself. If the employee were given a human assistant to help out, then they'd quickly get up to speed, and split the work. But anyone who has tried to wrangle text prompts for AI image generators knows that finessing those prompts is itself a creative task, one which involves a lot of second-guessing and frustration. It's like instead of hiring a human assistant, the company instead hired a gifted toddler to do the work, and did it in a room full of toys, and kept the kid hopped up on THC gummies.

"One of the main challenges of AI is that while AI is still essentially just software, it has a lot of aspects that are not present in traditional software products. For example, in contrast to traditional software, you can't predict in advance how AI solutions will behave in production," Leonid Feinberg, co-founder and CEO of Verax AI, told Lifewire via email. "This 'productivity paradox' saw companies investing heavily in computer technology without immediate returns."

AI, as we know it today, may come to be a useful tool to help people work in the same way that computers have made many jobs easier. But only if the big bosses realize this is the case and deploy AI tools as tools and not as fantasy robots that will replace their human minions. That may happen when AI vendors stop hawking their wares as do-it-all solutions. Until then, we may struggle with managing the demands of this new technology, all while our bosses try to ignore the complaints, convinced as they are that we are merely training our own virtual replacements.