Not so fast! AI isn't saving companies much time or money, study says

The Star

09-05-2025

Not for the first time, AI evangelists' lofty claims are running up against workplace realities. There's no shortage of companies making bold promises when it comes to their tech: Google thinks it could save your workers 122 hours of tedious work per year, and save your company lots of money. A new startup called Mechanize is aiming at replacing everyone's jobs – with who knows what impact on the economy.
But new research from the University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Institute for Economics says AI tools from market leaders like Google and OpenAI have yet to actually deliver on any of these big promises, let alone displace people from their jobs. Though AI is developing really speedily as newer, more sophisticated tools keep being released, and the study data had a cutoff point in late 2024, the results are still worth considering before you push your team to start using AI tools on a regular basis.
The research paper, news site TechRadar reports, shows that for companies that have adopted AI, the statistics suggest that AI tools aren't offering many significant benefits. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8%, for example. That equates to about one hour a week, based on a 40-hour work week, far below Google's promised 120-plus hours of savings. Meanwhile, in some cases, the research showed that AI tools actually added to people's duties and responsibilities, effectively boosting their workloads.
The data also show that when companies push their workers toward using AI, offering support and training, it will boost AI adoption – which you may think would boost savings. The research team, which questioned 25,000 people in Denmark , found this trick boosted AI adoption from 47% without support and training to 83% with support. AI adoption also appeared pretty widespread across different types of employers, with 'most' encouraging their use, and with some 30% of workers having received training.
But combined with the time savings data, the data show that using AI to save workers time, by, for example, taking over mundane office tasks, only led to higher earnings 3% to 7% of the time.
The researchers also noted that while AI chatbots do actually save time across diverse occupations for between 64% and 90% of users, the impact on the final quality of work and worker job satisfaction varied widely.
Meanwhile, only 8.4% of AI users said they saw new jobs being created by AI technology such as 'teachers monitoring AI-assisted cheating' or 'workers editing AI outputs and crafting better prompts,' (which is a new skill called prompt engineering) TechRadar noted.
In their summary, researchers noted that workers reported 'no evidence that firms with greater chatbot adoption have fared differently in total employment or wage bills.' And even a direct question – 'Have AI chatbots affected your labour earnings?' – confirms that 'workers perceive no earnings impact as of November 2024.' The research challenges 'narratives of imminent labor market transformations due to Generative AI,' the writers noted. 'While adoption has been rapid, with firms now heavily invested in unlocking the technological potential, the economic impacts remain small.'
Why should you care about this? There are a number of reasons this survey could be taken as not representative: starting with the fact it looked at workers in Denmark , who may have a dramatically different work culture than US companies and staff. But the data comes from an unusually large number of participants which makes these statistics numerically significant.
The research also provides an important talking point for company leaders interested in adopting AI to save costs or reap the benefits of higher employee efficiency because it challenges the overwhelmingly positive narrative being pushed by AI makers like Google or OpenAI.
It's also a message you can present to any staff members who say they're worried that AI will be used to replace their jobs – which could be as many as one in two workers in the US , recent data show. – Inc./Tribune News Service