A Wharton professor believes that businesses should motivate their employees to share their individual AI-enhanced productivity hacks, despite the prevalent practice of hiding these tactics due to corporate restrictions.
Worker’s Use of AI and Secrecy:
- Employees are increasingly using AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to boost their personal productivity and manage multiple jobs.
- However, due to strict corporate rules against AI use, these employees often keep their AI usage secret.
Issues with Corporate Restrictions:
- Companies tend to ban AI tools because of privacy and legal worries.
- These restrictions result in workers being reluctant to share their AI-driven productivity improvements, fearing potential penalties.
- Despite the bans, employees often find ways to circumvent these rules, like using their personal devices to access AI tools.
Proposed Incentives for Disclosure:
- The Wharton professor suggests that companies should incentivize employees to disclose their uses of AI.
- Proposed incentives could include shorter workdays, making the trade-off beneficial for both employees and the organization.
Anticipated Impact of AI:
- Generative AI is projected to significantly transform the labor market, particularly affecting white-collar and college-educated workers.
- As per a Goldman Sachs analysis, this technology could potentially affect 300 million full-time jobs and significantly boost global labor productivity.
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I have an anecdote of an opposite trend – maybe not common, but I thought perhaps interesting.
I recently interacted with a CEO and all of his (long) feedback on a proposal was fully chatGPT generated responses to my questions. While arguably they could produce a higher quality response by sitting down and working (because I know I could have), the quality of the interaction was acceptable and it contained one or two novel and applicable ideas.
So I’m looking at the graphics design work that gets done at the company, and while I can certainly see the path to doing it 100% with AI, that would require a significant amount of capital to develop reliably. I could just put that money in the bank, and pay the current team indefinitely off the interest. So their jobs are quite safe for now!
On the other hand, one thing I’ve considered doing is hiring someone to be my boss. I own the company, and am good at engineering, but that doesn’t magically make me also good at managing my time and that of other staff. I’m looking at the responses I got from that other CEO via ChatGPT, and suspect that it would be an acceptable tool in my case. So I am literally considering ‘hiring’ ChatGPT as an executive in my company – although obviously I have to take what it over-confidently says with a grain of salt, but that’s consistently been a recurring problem with human executives I’ve worked with too.