Everyone is using GenAI, and most of us are nervous.
Microsoft published a 2024 report on the state of Generative AI at work. Here's what you need to know.
Hi everyone! A few months ago, I visited Microsoft’s Dallas office to attend a demo of CoPilot for M365, their Generative AI solution for everyday work. During that presentation, I learned about Mircorsoft’s Work Trend Index report, which they publish for free on their website. After the demo, I read the full report. Today, I’m sharing the facts and figures that stood out to me, and what I make of them.
1. 78% of AI users are bringing their own AI tools to work.
GenAI stands out from other productivity-increasing tech. In the past, most technologies that made workers more efficient (e.g. steam engines, electricity, manufacturing, computers, robotics, the internet) required massive infrastructure or investment to bring into the workplace. Workers could hardly bring their own steam engine or mainframe computer. GenAI is different. While it’s true that it is built on top of a massive infrastructure of compute and training data, all of which would be out of reach for workers, many GenAI providers have made their tools so readily available, at low or no cost. It’s no surprise that workers have independently flocked to them without any (and sometimes, against) management direction. One surprising thing was that the percentage of workers who are using their personal GenAI tools at work (“Bring your own AI” or BYOAI) was high across all generation cohorts. Baby boomers and Zoomers alike are using GenAI to work faster and better.
2. ~50% of workers are reluctant to admit that they are using GenAI for the most important tasks and fear that using it makes them look replaceable.
This insight is unsurprising and simultaneously important. There is a lot of fear about AI making humans redundant, and the messaging from the expert class has been mixed. There are essentially 4 different lines of messaging that I’ve heard from the AI intelligencia:
The “Lazy college senior”: AI might take your job, but it’s a long way away. Don’t worry about it.
The Techno-optimist: AI won’t take most jobs, it is a tool that will enhance worker productivity and grow the whole pie.
The AI nihilist: AI will take jobs, let’s embrace it, push for AGI and UBI
The Luddite: AI will take jobs and destroy everything, let’s avoid it altogether.
Leaders in the GenAI world are bending over backward to handwave past the fears of the public, but these survey results may indicate that the messaging is not working.
3. Leaders are falling victim to “death by use cases.”
To justify the cost of GenAI, leaders end up stuck in use case purgatory.
"While leaders agree AI is a business imperative, many believe their organization lacks a plan and vision to go from individual impact to applying AI to drive the bottom line. The pressure to show immediate ROI is making leaders inert, even in the face of AI inevitability."
This takeaway should hit close to home for those of us in the corporate world. By many accounts, we are in a period of stagflation, and a lot of firms are hyper-focused on keeping costs low. This is a rational strategy, but when it comes to GenAI, I think people need a sandbox to play in. Asking workers to find valuable GenAI use cases for a tool they don’t have is like asking miners to find buried gold without digging. You can speculate, but without getting down in the dirt, it’s hard to know what’s there.
“Asking workers to find valuable GenAI use cases for a tool they don’t have is like asking miners to find buried gold without digging. You can speculate, but without getting down in the dirt, it’s hard to know what’s there.”
4. High-touch, generative roles will be first to feel the effects of GenAI.
According to Microsoft, writers, designers, and developers are on the leading edge of adopting GenAI. This makes sense, as the current solutions excel at generating high volumes of pseudo-novel outputs. Being a corporate create is starting to become less about generating content, and more about defining intent and prompting well. You don’t have to be the best copywriter anymore, but you do need to know what you want to say. This finding supports the “Techno-optimist” viewpoint.
So what do we make of this?
Most of these findings in the Microsoft report are intuitive and align with my lived experience. Most workers are playing with AI. Many people are uncertain about how AI will impact their jobs. Most corporations aren’t doing a great job turning these capabilities into enterprise value, and people in nominally creative roles are leading the way.
I think something important to remember is that we are still in the early innings of public usage of Generative AI. As Chamath pointed out in last week’s All In Podcast, the industry is still orienting itself, and the killer apps are still to come.
Link to the full report here.
Personally I am very skeptical of AI.