Latest news with #Humlum
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
You'll Spit Take When You Hear How Little Time Workers Are Saving With AI, According to This Huge New Study
The use of AI chatbots has exploded in the workplace. White-collar workers have adopted the tech in huge numbers. Executives are looking for every opportunity to shoehorn AI into every aspect of their businesses. Companies continue to pour tens of billions of dollars into building out enormous data centers to support increasingly power-hungry AI models. But is any of this actually leading to higher efficiency at work and increased pay? According to a recently-released working paper by a pair of economists at the University of Chicago and the University of Copenhagen that was spotted by Fortune, it's not looking great. After analyzing data about 25,000 workers across 7,000 workspaces, users of AI only saved on average three percent of time. And only a meager three to seven percent of those productivity gains translated into bigger paychecks, they found. Put simply, AI isn't even close to coming for everybody's jobs, a frequently cited fear — and it's not exactly making workers more productive, either, despite the industry's many reassurances. "While adoption has been rapid, with firms now heavily invested in unlocking the technological potential, the economic impacts remain small," the two economists wrote in their paper. "Our findings challenge narratives of imminent labor market transformation due to generative AI." As The Economist points out, while many pundits point to growing unemployment and blame AI, existing macroeconomic data suggests there are plenty of other reasons to blame. To the contrary, the magazine found that employment in white-collar work has actually risen in the past year. "Software, writing code, writing marketing tasks, writing job posts for HR professionals — these are the tasks the AI can speed up," coauthor Anders Humlum, at UChicago, told Fortune. "But in a broader occupational survey, where AI can still be helpful, we see much smaller savings." "I might save time drafting an email using a large language model, so I save some time there, but the important question is, what do I use that time savings for?' he added. "Is the marginal task I'm shifting my work toward a productive task?" What workers actually do with the tiny amounts of extra free time, courtesy of AI, isn't exactly comforting, either. More than 80 percent of workers in the study said they used saved time for more work. Less than ten percent said they took the time off. The findings "suggest that workers are not exactly knocking on the boss's door asking for more work," Humlum told Fortune. Signs that the impact of AI on the labor market has been overblown are certainly there. Earlier this year, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted that his all-in approach to replacing human customer service agents with AI was not working. The company revealed last week that it's facing net losses of $99 million for the first quarter of this year, more than double compared to the same period last year. Last week, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn walked back his earlier promises to replace all contract workers with AI following an immense wave of customer blowback. Earlier this month, an IBM survey found that only a fraction of AI initiatives are delivering a return on investment after surveying 2,000 CEOs. These latest findings are an intriguing reality check for the notion that AI is coming for all of our jobs. Perhaps the tech is both making us efficient, but also failing to make us redundant. The conclusion highlights growing concerns that generative AI tech may be a dead end after all, as some experts have warned. Perhaps our jobs may be safe — other societal factors, like historic levels of economic uncertainty, notwithstanding. More on AI job automation: AI Is Replacing Women's Jobs Specifically
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Study looking at AI chatbots in 7,000 workplaces finds ‘no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation'
AI chatbots have been rolled out across hundreds of white-collar workplaces, but on average, their effect on hours and pay has been negligible, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper linking AI use to corporate records in Denmark. On average, employees saved 3% of their time, while just 3%-7% of their productivity gains came back to them in the form of higher pay. Since OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT just over two years ago, AI chatbots have become the fastest-adopted technologies in history, rivaling the PC three decades ago. Their popularity has created and destroyed entire job descriptions and sent company valuations into the stratosphere—then back down to earth. And yet, one of the first studies to look at AI use in conjunction with employment data finds the technology's effect on time and money to be negligible. 'AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation,' economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard wrote in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper released this week. Humlum, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and Emilie Vestergaard, an economics PhD student at the University of Copenhagen, looked at 25,000 workers across 7,000 workspaces, focusing on occupations believed to be susceptible to disruption by AI: accountants, customer support specialists, financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists, journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals, office clerks, software developers, and teachers. They pulled records from Denmark, a country whose rates of AI adoption as well as hiring and firing practices are similar to those in the U.S. but where record-keeping is far more detailed, allowing the study to anonymously match survey responses to records of actual hours and pay. On average, users of AI at work had a time savings of 3%, the researchers found. Some saved more time, but didn't see better pay, with just 3%-7% of productivity gains being passed on to paychecks. In other words, while they found no mass displacement of human workers, neither did they see transformed productivity or hefty raises for AI-wielding superworkers. 'While adoption has been rapid, with firms now heavily invested in unlocking the technological potential, the economic impacts remain small,' the authors write. Productivity, interrupted The findings might be a surprise against the backdrop of aggressive corporate adoption of AI: from Duolingo replacing its contract workers with AI to Shopify decreeing it will only hire humans as a second choice to AI. Meanwhile, investors have been bidding up shares of companies involved in AI. But the NBER paper doesn't mean that earlier findings of AI's productivity boost have been wrong, said Humlum—just incomplete. Most of the earlier research has focused 'exactly on the occupations where the time savings are largest,' Humlum told Fortune. 'Software, writing code, writing marketing tasks, writing job posts for HR professionals—these are the tasks the AI can speed up. But in a broader occupational survey, where AI can still be helpful, we see much smaller savings,' he said. Other factors that explain AI's overall ho-hum impact include employer buy-in and employees' own time management. 'I might save time drafting an email using a large language model, so I save some time there, but the important question is, what do I use that time savings for?' he said. 'Is the marginal task I'm shifting my work toward a productive task?' Workers in the study allocated more than 80% of their saved time to other work tasks (less than 10% said they took more breaks or leisure time), including new tasks created by the use of AI, such as editing AI-generated copy, or, in Humlum's own case, adjusting exams to make sure that students aren't using AI to cheat. There's also the fact that real workplaces are much messier than structured experiments. 'In the real world, many workers are using these tools without even the endorsement of the boss. Some don't even know if they're allowed to use it; some are allowed but not really encouraged to use it,' Humlum said. 'In a workplace where it's not explicitly encouraged, there's limited space to go to your boss and say, 'I'd like to take on more work because AI has made me more productive,'' let alone negotiate for higher pay based on higher productivity. And of course, employees might not want to advertise how much more productive AI has made them, especially considering the well-trod adage that the reward for efficient workers is more work. Some of the findings around hours and pay in workplaces where AI isn't used 'suggest that workers are not exactly knocking on the boss's door asking for more work,' Humlum said. Great expectations, mid results The NBER paper comes on the heels of other indications suggesting that AI's potential, while tremendous, has been vastly overstated in the media and the market. Payment processor Klarna, which made waves last year when it revealed it stopped hiring humans in favor of a super-productive AI, recently tempered its rhetoric. An IBM survey of 2,000 CEOs revealed that just 25% of AI projects deliver on their promised return on investment. The main driver of adoption, it seems, is corporate FOMO, with nearly two-thirds of CEOs agreeing that 'the risk of falling behind drives them to invest in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organization,' according to the study. Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, who has extensively researched automation and labor, estimates AI's productivity boost at approximately 1.1% to 1.6% of GDP in the next decade—a sizable boost for an advanced economy like the U.S., but far from the doubling of GDP some technologists have predicted. The danger with AI is that 'the hype will likely go on for a while and do much more damage in the process than experts are anticipating,' he wrote for Fortune last year. In fact, 'getting productivity gains from any technology requires organizational adjustment, a range of complementary investments, and improvements in worker skills, via training and on-the-job learning,' he said. That's a finding backed up by Humlum and Vestegaard, whose paper showed greater productivity gains when employers encouraged AI use and trained workers in it. It could also be just a matter of time. After all, the Industrial Revolution went on for a century, transforming how people lived and worked long after the invention of the steam engine. 'It took a couple decades to see that we can have an assembly line powered by electricity instead of having everything run centrally via a steam engine,' Humlum said. This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI is storming workplaces — and barely making a difference, study says
Surely, the billions of dollars invested in AI chatbots will increase productivity and put economic performance into hyperdrive, right? Hold the phone, say researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 'Despite substantial investments [in chatbots], economic impacts remain minimal,' they write in a new report. Economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard estimate in the report, called 'Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects,' that productivity gains from AI chatbots amounted to a mere 3% in time savings. 'AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%,' they write. Considering the corporate hype promising revolutionary change in a post-ChatGPT world — both Shopify and Duolingo announced recently that managers would need to justify hiring humans instead of using AI — the NBER report lets a lot of air out of the balloon. The researchers collected the majority of their data in Denmark, a country with high AI adoption and detailed record-keeping. They found that AI adoption had yet to lead to massive layoffs, but neither did it deliver considerable financial advantages to either employers or employees. Instead, most of the hype is based on corporate FOMO and a desire to keep up with rivals. The report says that earlier studies focused mostly on areas where the time-saving advantages of AI chatbots were most obvious, like with customer support specialists, who are being replaced en masse. Humlum and Vestergaard looked beyond the obvious and studied 7,000 workplaces that included fields such as law, journalism, bookkeeping, financial advice, and teaching. 'Software, writing code, writing marketing tasks, writing job posts for HR professionals — these are the tasks the AI can speed up,' Humlum told Fortune, saying that earlier studies weren't wrong, just incomplete. 'In a broader occupational survey, where AI can still be helpful, we see much smaller savings.' Employee time freed up by AI was used for other work tasks — including fixing mistakes created by AI in transcription, or making it difficult for students to use AI to cheat. Earlier this year, 2024 Nobel prize winner Daron Acemoglu predicted that AI adoption will increase the U.S. GDP by only as much as 1.6 percent in the next decade, while productivity would only increase 0.05 percent. 'We're still going to have journalists, we're still going to have financial analysts, we're still going to have HR employees,' he told MIT Technology Review. 'It's going to impact a bunch of office jobs that are about data summary, visual matching, pattern recognition, etc. And those are essentially about 5% of the economy.' Acemoglu went on to suggest that 'hype is making us invest badly in terms of the technology.' 'We're using it too much for automation and not enough for providing expertise and information to workers,' he said. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
CNBC
08-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Generative AI like ChatGPT is at risk of creating new gender gap at work
Popular generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT can be a boon for productivity and efficiency. But in adoption of the technology at work, a significant gender gap threatens the widespread use of it. Technology and business leaders need to wake up to this reality or risk missing out on the potential benefits of AI for business, which include improved customer service, more efficient content creation, enhanced data analysis, and cost savings through automation. New research shows that women are considerably less likely than men to use ChatGPT. Why that is the case was not part of the research, but regardless, it's something senior technology executives including chief information officers and chief technology officers, as well as other C-suite leaders, need to be concerned about. "Recent studies have documented meaningful productivity gains from tools like ChatGPT," said Anders Humlum, assistant professor of economics at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. "The fact that women are significantly less likely to use these tools means they may be missing out on these benefits," Humlum said. For businesses, this represents both a lost opportunity to boost overall productivity and a potential driver of widening gaps between workers, Humlum said. In a survey of 18,000 workers from 11 occupations completed in 2024, researchers at the University of Chicago in collaboration with Statistics Denmark found that ChatGPT has been widely adopted in those occupations, with 41 percent of workers using it for job-related tasks. On-the-job adoption rates ranged from 65% for marketing professionals to 12% for financial advisors, and almost everyone in the survey was aware of the technology, according to the report. But when researchers looked at the demographics, they discovered that women were 16 percentage points less likely than men to use ChatGPT for job tasks, even when comparing workers within the same occupation and with similar job responsibilities. Research from professional services firm Deloitte also indicated a gender gap in generative AI adoption. Its analysis showed that women in the U.S. have been lagging in taking up the technology. In 2023, Deloitte said, women's adoption of generative AI was about half that of men. In 2024, the gap remained, although it was narrower. "Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT offer businesses the opportunity to streamline tasks and boost efficiency," said Ritu Jyoti, group vice president and general manager of AI and data market research and advisory services at International Data Corp. "However, concerns arise if there is a disparity in the utilization of these tools, particularly among women. This discrepancy could hinder businesses from fully capitalizing on productivity improvements across their workforce." The existing gender gap in AI adoption has the potential to exacerbate inequalities within the workplace, Jyoti said. "The essence of innovation lies in diverse viewpoints," she said. "If women do not have equal representation in the use of AI tools, businesses run the risk of missing out on novel ideas and solutions that emerge from a more inclusive approach." One possible solution to address the AI gender gap is to provide better training and support. "Establish comprehensive training initiatives to ensure all employees, irrespective of gender, are proficient in utilizing AI tools," Jyoti said. "This can encompass workshops, online courses, and personalized mentoring sessions." Research conducted by Humlum has shown that targeted training on how to integrate tools such as ChatGPT into daily workflows can be highly effective in closing gender gaps in usage, he said. Companies need to offer practical, hands-on training, in which they equip employees with real-world examples of how ChatGPT can support their tasks, Humlum said. "Training increases confidence and lowers the barrier to entry," he said. In addition, organizations that establish clear policies outlining appropriate use of generative AI tend to see broader adoption, especially among women, Humlum said. "Set clear usage guidelines," he said. "Clarify expectations around when and how generative AI should be used. This helps normalize adoption and gives workers permission to explore the tools." It's also a good practice to highlight role models and success stories with AI. "Sharing examples of employees who have benefited from using AI — especially women — can foster peer learning and encourage uptake," Humlum said. And businesses also need to monitor and support equitable adoption of AI-based applications. "Track usage across groups and provide targeted support where adoption lags to ensure the benefits are broadly shared," Humlum said. Companies can regularly evaluate AI adoption rates and productivity metrics to identify gender gaps, Jyoti said. "Implement strategies such as targeted incentives for underrepresented groups, to rectify these disparities," she said. In a broader sense, businesses need to promote an inclusive culture, Jyoti said. "Foster a work environment that encourages the utilization of AI tools by all team members," she said. By highlighting the benefits of AI integration, companies can help to dispel any reservations or stigmas regarding AI, she said. To help ensure diverse representation, organizations also need to involve women in the development of AI applications, Jyoti said. "Diverse teams play a vital role in identifying and rectifying biases in AI systems, enhancing their fairness and effectiveness," she said. By implementing these measures, organizations can create an equitable environment that maximizes the advantages of generative AI for all employees, Jyoti said.
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Scientist Says That ChatGPT Has a "Staggering" Gender Problem
As popular as ChatGPT has become, it apparently has a major gender problem. In an interview with PsyPost, University of Chicago economist Anders Humlum explained that in his research, he's encountered a "staggering gender gap in the adoption of ChatGPT." At the end of last year, Humlum and his colleague Emilie Vestergaard of the University of Copenhagen revealed in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that women were 16 percentage points behind men in ChatGPT adoption. This trend was evident, the economist told PsyPost, "even among workers in the same jobs handling similar job tasks." Among the eleven "exposed" occupations they assessed — from software developers to teachers and legal professionals to customer service reps — journalists and marketing professionals were the most likely to use OpenAI's flagship chatbot, with roughly 64 percent attesting that they use it for work. Curiously, financial advisors and accountants had the lowest share of ChatGPT use, weighing in at just 18 percent of workers in those fields who said they use it for work. That could be because, as the paper notes, they "handle sensitive information" as part of their daily duties. Across the occupations surveyed, however, women were always behind men on adoption rates. Only about 62 percent of female journalists and marketers reported that they use ChatGPT for work — and the disparity was greater for women who work in financial advising, with fewer than 10 percent saying they had used it on the job. So what's behind the gender gap in ChatGPT adoption? To put it frankly, the researchers haven't quite figured that bit out. As Humlum and Vestergaard noted in their paper, women are "about as optimistic as men about the time savings from ChatGPT," and seem to even save a bit more time than their male counterparts in the workplace when they do use it. There's some evidence that women have more "adoption friction" — aversion, basically — to AI due to a lack of training with the tech, and women were more likely than men to say they "do not know how" to use ChatGPT. The researchers pointed to another 2024 survey that looked into student ChatGPT usage in Norway for potential answers. In the first half of that study, researchers at Norway's Institute of Economics found that of the more than 500 students they surveyed, men were between 10 and 25 percentage points more likely than women to use ChatGPT regularly. Overall, that Norwegian study found that "female students use ChatGPT much less, are less proficient at writing ChatGPT prompts, and are more sensitive to bans on using ChatGPT," Humlum and Vestergaard wrote. While their Nordic counterparts didn't have any hard-and-fast explanations for that gender gap, both studies documenting the trend make it seem pretty legit. As he told PsyPost, Humlum is most interested in figuring out "how generative AI is reshaping labor markets" — but this finding was, nevertheless, "a big surprise for us." More on AI and work: People With This Level of Education Use AI the Most at Work
