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AI Boosts Workload, Not Reduces It

WSJ: "One of the great hopes for AI—at least, among workers—is that it will ease workloads, freeing people up for more high-level, creative pursuits. So far, the opposite is happening, new data show...AI is increasing the speed, density and complexity of work rather than reducing it, according to an analysis of 164,000 workers’ digital work activity. The data, from workforce analytics and productivity-tracking software company ActivTrak, covers more than 443 million hours of work across 1,111 employers, making it one of the biggest studies of AI’s effects on work habits to date." This is hardly the first study to come to a similar conclusion. In my "GenAI & Productivity" report (https://t.co/kEx5Z4BbRz), I catalogued many of them, from "workslop" challenges to the failure rate of enterprise AI initiatives. This one was particularly eye-opening to me: "In study results released in July, non-profit Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR) had a troubling finding. Sixteen experienced developers participated in the study. They were assigned 246 coding tasks and asked to forecast time to completion for each task. The tasks were then randomly assigned to allow or disallow AI tool usage. METR’s finding: 'After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increased completion time by 19%—AI tooling slowed developers down.'" Regardless of how you view the transformative potential of AI (and I do believe it is the definitional technology of the next half century and beyond), it's important to keep historical perspective about the rate at which transformative technologies lead to productivity gains. To again quote the report: "The time it takes for enabling technologies to drive meaningful productivity gains has been shrinking. Nonetheless, expecting genAI to significantly boost productivity across sectors in the next three years is likely excessively optimistic, as the chart below from JP Morgan illustrates. We do expect the productivity resurgence to continue—lower than the highs of the dotcom boom but still higher than the post-GFC regime—as creative destruction remains elevated. GenAI will contribute to that creative destruction. So too will a plethora of other structural and cyclical forces, from deglobalization and domestic and geopolitical instability to inflation and persistently higher nominal rates to decarbonization and electrification." What does that mean for AI-trade positioning? I provide my perspective on that question in the report. Learn more about Sage Road Research: https://t.co/Wgwz2xmY1y. Interested in subscribing? Message me. WSJ link: https://t.co/YuLZzLYDAX