77% of Employees Report AI Has Increased Workloads and Hampered Productivity

This is a paid ad by Upwork masquerading as an article.

It’s based on a study that Upwork sponsored, and it cites a bunch of conclusions that make freelancers seem attractive to big orgs:

C-suite executives, bringing in freelance talent into their workforce say freelancers are meeting productivity demands and often exceeding them, outpacing full-time employees. The level of well-being and engagement has improved. And they have doubled the following outcomes for their business: organizational agility (45%), quality of work being produced (40%), innovation (39%), scalability (39%), revenue and bottom line (36%) and efficiency (34%). The findings also show that 80% of leaders who leverage freelance talent say it is essential to their business, and 38% of leaders who don’t already leverage this talent pool intend to start in the coming year.

This is a stealth ad meant to engender FOMO in business decision makers: “Your existing employees won’t get results quickly because AI is overloading them - instead, hire a clever freelancer who has figured out how to use AI to their advantage, and reap the rewards!”

Turns out I only needed one out five 'whys' to find the root cause:

The majority of global C-suite leaders (81%) acknowledge they have increased demands on their workers in the past year.

If your C-suite have bought into the dream that AI magically makes everyone more productive, but haven't invested the time or cash to roll it out in well-understood, provably useful ways, then employees are going to find themselves fighting to get the 'expected' (read 'magical dreams') productivity gains, and they'll waste a lot of time trying to apply AI to problems where it doesn't really fit as a solution.

None of that says anything about AI and it's usefulness in the right context. It's all just people who don't understand a problem or the right solution jumping in and saying "I know best because I'm the highest paid!"

This is what happens when expectations of productivity gains thanks to AI are not realistically set:

"Despite 96% of C-suite executives expecting AI to boost productivity, the study reveals that, 77% of employees using AI say it has added to their workload and created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains." (cf. Forbes article below)

The reality: AI models (generative or not) are useful in specific cases, not all cases. Failing to acknowledge that and failing to strategise accordingly only leads to short term success and long term pain. For example, use cases that imply relying on LLMs as reasoning engines are doomed to fail given the current state of the art. If you want to know which use cases make sense, check out my articles on medium (DMs also open):

https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/where-genera...

https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/chatgpt-and-...

We keep getting assaulted by co-pilot, which sucks in the first place, but also doesn't really work correctly given our non-standard Microsoft environment. One of my analysts tries to use GPT to solve problems, but he doesn't understand the problems he's solving, so he can't properly evaluate the solutions GPT is spitting out. Honestly, I hate AI so much, I hate the hype, I hate how companies are pushing it. For most cases it's an enormous waste of energy, and companies are much more afraid of missing out on revenue than they are of wasting or misusing technology.

Thankfully my company isn't trying to inject AI into everything, and we're the better for it. I do use chatgpt a little in my job, but only a little. This generation of LLMs are simply far too unreliable to be depended upon for anything serious. AI is not going to make you more productive if you need to double check everything it outputs.

Intellij recently introduced a feature which uses AI to complete a line of code. Almost every time, it produced incorrect code, like it would generate the line of code and immediately there would be red squiggly underlines highlighting all the errors. It wasted my time and I'm more productive by turning that feature off.

No doubt AI will continue to improve, but the current state of the art simply isn't good enough to make most of us any more productive. Often the opposite.

I may be using the term AI too broadly here, but hopefully you understand I'm referring to LLM chatbots like chatgpt, and related technologies like copilot.

This article reads like a covert ad for Upwork, a platform for hiring freelancers.

> C-suite executives, bringing in freelance talent into their workforce say freelancers are meeting productivity demands and often exceeding them, outpacing full-time employees.

> a fundamental shift in how we organize talent and work

> leveraging alternative talent pools

= "You should hire freelancers instead of full-time employees."

> outdated work models

I guess they try to project the idea that full-time employment is outdated.

> Despite 96% of C-suite executives expecting AI to boost productivity, the study reveals that, 77% of employees using AI say it has added to their workload and created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains.

Well, there’s the problem. This is just like the 80s and early 90s when execs decided to drop computers into the workflow of their employees and expect instant improvements.

Very poor article. It doesn't link to the study, and it doesn't give details about what type of workers the study examined.

Hate to say but this absolutely squares with my experience. The only people excited are people who simply do not know enough to know they are wrong.

Eventually the economics will catch up to these middle managers but unfortunately I don't think they'll figure out they themselves were responsible for the coming crash.

I don't know about the roles surveyed, but at my job technologists are only allowed to use slow half baked IDE integrations. The result is slower everything because it eats so much RAM.

AI has helped me a lot to write code. At a conference recently someone said it makes a senior 10x more productive (I'd say 2x), but a junior 50% less productive.

You need to understand what ChatGPT is saying.

I wanted a backward compatible change to code. ChatGPT proposed something, I was sure this was not backward compatible. Argued for 10 minutes but ChatGPT insisted it was (it was around lower/uppercase).

I used to see some devs brute-force autocomplete on the IDE to find a method, and now I see people spend hours trying to make ChatGPT spit out a valid block of code for a particular task.

I write software for the publishing industry, particularly many business to business publications. The rise of AI is a huge transformative force here. Those who aren't injecting AI into their products are at a large disadvantage.

The people talking about the disadvantages of AI on this page are mostly right. But for the typical article in a B2B magazine, AI can already produce output better than many, or even most entry level writers. Editors are doing that themselves in lieu of hiring. We're just removing the copy and paste from a chatbot step. This is table stakes now, people are doing this not expecting to get ahead but just trying to keep up.

To push back is to be the milk man who refuses to trade in his old horse for a truck. That choice may be good for the horse, but not for long. As a programmer I identify more with the horse than the milk man. I too am trying not to get knackered.

Link to the study: https://investors.upwork.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

This is almost the exact opposite of the responses we just got from a survey of around 800 people, which showed of them 78% regularly use AI/LLMs to augment their work and of that over 90% reported that they've found it to improve their work efficiency.

It’s strange to combine “increased workloads” and “hampered productivity” in the same stat.

Should be obvious that employees will nearly always either believe or want others to believe that their jobs have gotten harder. It’s not in their best interest to say that things have improved.

I’m in the 23% here, I guess.

My workload has increased and my productivity has increased. I’m not a programmer — I work in marketing. But there have been dozens of small scripts and automations that I could’ve written without AI but that would’ve been frustrating for me to figure out that I can now whip up in minutes with AI.

I really hope that people hate AI and fight against using it because it gives me an edge.

I'll tell the other side of the story.

I am not allowed to use ChatGPT and Copilot in my work.

As a result, I feel hampered, terribly. Especially because I usually work on hobby projects in the weekends where I use both consistently. Not a day goes by that I don't ask ChatGPT to reorganize some code, tell me what a function of some library does, or tell me about a specific error I am facing. Multiple times a day I will write a comment about what is going to happen in the next line and have Copilot generate the rest for me.

I feel like a carpenter being forced to use a screwdriver instead of a drill.

I'm currently unemployed, and my last job ended over two years ago, so my experience is more related to the pre-AI boom era.

Back then, I often felt that the software products we were developing could have been created by much smaller teams of experienced programmers, or even by a single programmer. I'm referring specifically to direct programming, excluding management, QA, and devops. My professional experience is primarily with startups and small companies, but I believe this idea could extend to some larger products as well.

This raises the question of whether I, as a programmer, was productive enough. I believe that my colleagues and I were quite productive, and we performed our daily tasks honestly and fairly. However, I feel that our responsibilities were artificially limited. I think my productivity could have been much higher if my responsibilities within the company had been expanded. At least, this is what my personal, non-commercial experience with my pet projects in my spare time suggests.

I understand that a pet project is not the same as a business solution, but I believe the core issue is not that AI affects programmers' productivity, but that AI has helped management realize that increasing the number of programmers does not necessarily improve product quality.

I also found Josh Christiane's video on this topic very insightful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAwtrJlBVJY

The headline is based on this claim from the report:

> Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way

Which, to my understanding, was not a question asked directly, but is instead the total number of people who answered "yes" to any of whether they're "spending more time reviewing or moderating AI-generated content", "invest more time learning to use these tools", "are now being asked to do more work", etc.

So you could have spent some time to learn the tools, realize massive productivity gains from it, and be included in that 77%. It's not whether it increased your workload on net.

Best use of it has just having it there. Being able to drop a question into ChatGPT and hear ideas or data come back quickly is a great relief whenever you face a groan-type task.

But what its really shone light on is that, for most tasks, it's the formulating of the problem itself that takes up the bulk of the work, not executing the solution. And without being able to know when its solution is inappropriate, I don't see how it's not going to make "two steps back" situations for sub-senior developers.

This is nothing more than marketing propaganda by Upwork. Flagged.

This is an advertisement with highly questionable statistics and data. Its informational utility is so poor I’d almost think it was written by an Upwork freelancer using AI.

Link to the study: https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models

It's definitely biased but still interesting.

First things first: The "article" (if it can be called one) is complete garbage and is nothing more than an advert for UpWork. That being said, the (clickbait) title resonates with me and from what I can observe with my colleagues at least.

It's clear to me from talking to the C-level in my company that they've been completely hoodwinked by Sam "Give me your biotelemetrics" Altman and others like him into thinking current day LLM technology is some sort of superhuman AI capable of replacing entire teams. The only thing they hear in their circles is "Infinite productivity and growth!!!" and salivating at the thought like an abused dog hearing a dinner bell that's never actually coming.

We build customer support software, and the CEO is adamant on "replacing 95% of human agents with an AI chatbot". So we've been building out this AI feature (Read: we're calling OpenAI's APIs with some custom prompts) and it's been laughable how fucking useless and unusable it is. The responses are full of lies & contradictions and never actually answers any queries with any kind of accuracy once you examine the output for longer than 2 seconds. But the C-level is loving it, despite it being a massive resource drain in every conceivable way, I suspect because now they can put "We have AI!" in their pitch to investors.

I dream of a massive solar storm that wipes out all of this crap off the planet for good, because I'm not sure if I can handle the incoming future full of spam, scams, lies automated at such an insane rate.

> The part that is not debatable is that not only is AI not going away, it’s on the upswing. You can get that tattooed. So it’s important to develop a reasonable comfort around its use.

I mean, this is a bold claim to make in an article about the thing being bad. Like "this reduces productivity, but it will inevitably take over the world anyway, because reasons" is a weird stance.

This is a sham study funded by UpWork whose business is likely being hit by AI, since many low-skilled office tasks can now be automated.

so AI increases workloads and hampers productivity

But only for employees

freelancers are very efficient with using AI

so the solution to the problem is to hire freelancers

and the best place to find freelancers is Upwork

and the study is conducted by Upwork.

got it.

That's because the workforce doesn't know how to use AI. The expectations are legitimate for me as an employer.

The headline is the clickbait, but the overwhelming argument of the article is an advertorial for outsourcing.

(Also, a video keeps sliding in over the article: "Miley Cyrus Explains Why Growing With Her Audience Means So Much To Her".)

Forbes seems to be garbage now, and maybe we shouldn't reward them by upvoting articles like this, even if the clickbait appeals (so people are going to want to comment without reading the article).

No one has to use anything. Like. Don’t click the button.