Bosses being severely disconnected from the needs of their employees is a tale as old as time. But it sure feels like the AI craze has driven them to lock themselves in ever taller ivory towers, as employees are told that the tech is going to make their jobs easier at the same time it’s being used to replace them.
Now, a new survey highlighted by the Wall Street Journal illustrates this growing technological divide between grunts and execs.
After questioning 5,000 white collar workers, the consulting firm Section found that a whopping 40 percent of those not in management roles said that AI saves them no time whatsoever over the course of an entire week. And just two percent said that AI saves them more than 12 hours.
Contrast that with the responses of executives, of whom very few are disillusioned with AI. Just two percent said that AI doesn’t save them any time, while a sizable 19 percent said it saves more than 12 hours per week.
Executives “automatically assume AI is going to be the savior,” Steve McGarvey, a user experience designer, told the WSJ.
He drew on his personal experience of large language models bogging down his work, which focuses on making websites accessible to visitors who are visually impaired.
“I can’t count the number of times that I’ve sought a solution for a problem, asked an LLM, and it gave me a solution to an accessibility problem that was completely wrong,” McGarvey added.
Much attention has been paid to companies that use AI to justify brutal layoffs. But the employees that keep their jobs find themselves being forced to use new and still-experimental AI tools that may not be all that useful for their specific roles, with any complaints they raise falling on deaf ears.
Evangelism for the tech runs rampant among leadership at the biggest companies in the world. Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, for example, reportedly told his employees that they’d be “insane” not to use AI to do literally “every task” possible, after he caught wind of some of his managers suggesting that employees use it less. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Google’s bosses have bragged that a large chunk of their companies’ code is written with AI.
The Section survey also found that there’s significant unease over AI among the rank and file. Roughly two thirds of regular workers said they felt anxious or overwhelmed about AI, while less than half of managers felt the same way. Once again in complete contrast to their underlings, nearly 75 percent of executives said they were excited about the tech.
The jury’s still out on whether AI actually boosts productivity. But there’s a growing body of research suggesting it isn’t the efficiency miracle that CEOs make it out to be. A widely covered MIT study found that 95 percent of companies that adopted AI saw no meaningful growth in revenue. Perhaps that’s because AI agents overwhelmingly fail to complete common remote work and office tasks, other studies found, or because AI coding assistants actually slow down the programmers that use them, as another concluded.
Part of the problem is that it’s unclear what AI is most useful for. Dan Hiester, a user experience engineer, told the WSJ that one coding task he used AI to help with, which should’ve only taken half an hour, ended up taking up his entire afternoon, while another task he expected to take days took just 20 minutes with AI.
“It’s done a complete reset of my understanding of how to estimate the time it takes to do something,” he told the WSJ.
Of course, maybe the reason CEOs think that AI is saving them so much time and their workers don’t is because their jobs, more so than others, can be easily replaced with it.
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