The new global study, in partnership with The Upwork Research Institute, interviewed 2,500 global C-suite executives, full-time employees and freelancers. Results show that the optimistic expectations about AI’s impact are not aligning with the reality faced by many employees. The study identifies a disconnect between the high expectations of managers and the actual experiences of employees using AI.
Despite 96% of C-suite executives expecting AI to boost productivity, the study reveals that, 77% of employees using AI say it has added to their workload and created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains. Not only is AI increasing the workloads of full-time employees, it’s hampering productivity and contributing to employee burnout.
AI is stupidly used a lot but this seems odd. For me GitHub copilot has sped up writing code. Hard to say how much but it definitely saves me seconds several times per day. It certainly hasn’t made my workload more…
Probably because the vast majority of the workforce does not work in tech but has had these clunky, failure-prone tools foisted on them by tech. Companies are inserting AI into everything, so what used to be a problem that could be solved in 5 steps now takes 6 steps, with the new step being “figure out how to bypass the AI to get to the actual human who can fix my problem”.
I’ve thought for a long time that there are a ton of legitimate business problems out there that could be solved with software. Not with AI. AI isn’t necessary, or even helpful, in most of these situations. The problem is that creatibg meaningful solutions requires the people who write the checks to actually understand some of these problems. I can count on one hand the number of business executives that I’ve met who were actually capable of that.
I’ll say that so far I’ve been pretty unimpressed by Codeium.
At the very most it has given me a few minutes total of value in the last 4 months.
Ive gotten some benefit from various generic chat LLMs like ChatGPT but most of that has been somewhat improved versions of the kind of info I was getting from Stackexchange threads and the like.
There’s been some mild value in some cases but so far nothing earth shattering or worth a bunch of money.
I have never heard of Codeium but it says it’s free, which may explain why it sucks. Copilot is excellent. Completely life changing, no. That’s not the goal. The goal is to reduce the manual writing of predictable and boring lines of code and it succeeds at that.
I presume it depends on the area you would be working with and what technologies you are working with. I assume it does better for some popular things that tend to be very verbose and tedious.
My experience including with a copilot trial has been like yours, a bit underwhelming. But I assume others must be getting benefit.
They’ve got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it’s a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with “plausible bullshit” in their products.
I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I’m not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.
I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify “yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases” and “You’re going to actually have to CALL the function under test”, but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn’t need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.
I’d be hesitant to trust it with “summarize this obtuse spec document” when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn’t suitable.
Maybe the problem is that I’m too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association “why not try glue on pizza” type discussions, but when you already know “send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW” having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.
I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent “here’s why it’s broken” sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.
Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that “Carrying battleaxe” doesn’t mean “katana randomly jutting out from forearms”, maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.