Capitalists around the world are eagerly awaiting the day when AI finally fulfills the tech industry’s long-held promise of creating a more efficient tool than human workers.
In the four years since AI became widely available as a commercial product, these productivity gains have mostly failed to materialize. Today, there are signs that efforts to automate work are ironically backfiring, as workers who have been forced to adopt AI tools become less and less efficient over time.
New analysis released by workplace monitoring company ActivTrak, covered for the first time by Gizmodofound that white-collar workers who use AI work up to 90 minutes more each day compared to non-users.
To arrive at this staggering figure, the company’s analysts examined the anonymized work activity of more than 9,100 employees at more than 450 companies between April and September. For non-AI users observed during this period, the average active workday was 7.6 hours, compared to between 8.4 and 9.1 hours for heavy AI users.
For workers, the findings could add to the body of evidence suggesting that sorting AI-generated waste takes longer than if it were simply performing workplace tasks by hand. It could also indicate that employers are not necessarily using AI to replace jobs en masse, but as an excuse to demand even more labor per worker, regardless of any real efficiency gains.
From a managerial perspective, the results suggest that heavy AI users must spend additional billable time working outside of normal hours, while experiencing a higher frequency of work interruption than light or non-AI users.
As Gabriela Mauch, head of ActivTrak’s productivity research division, wrote in the company’s press release, AI “may help employees complete tasks faster, but our research shows that it contributes to longer workdays, more application switching, and shorter focus sessions.”
Learn more about AI: There are now growing signs that AI is hurting jobs in the labor market
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