Transcription
A lot of this anger seems to be around just no one's trying right now. So if I think if workers felt like someone was trying to actually listen to them and their issues with this technology in this moment um then the anger could come down a bit. This thing to me is just kind of a new computer, a new web browser and for people to be reacting this way is alarming to all the people who really hate AI. Um, just think about it as a skill you can develop and use. Um, but that doesn't mean you have to love it.
Today on the tech report, I'm joined by business editor for Fortune, Nick Likenberg. Thanks for coming on.
>> Hey, thank you for having me.
So there's been another survey, this time by digital adoption platform WalkMe, which has found that AI adoption in the workplace is not as plug-and-play as it was first advertised at the very least. In your piece for Fortune, you explained that 80% of white-collar workers are rejecting their company's AI mandates. That's the headline you went with. Can you just quickly take us through the the findings of the survey and what you explained in the article?
>> Yeah, thank you and uh great to be on with you. Uh I had a call with the WalkMe CEO Dan and we talked about this and uh we even talked about whether we're at a quiet quitting phase for the AI movement and Dan doesn't see it that way but um he said there's definite frustration and rebellion that's going on here. uh uh rebellion is more my phrase than his, but um just this feeling that AI is being kind of crammed down on people and that it creates more problems than it solves. And uh I've had my a bit of my own experience with this and um I'm seeing this in other surveys and other things I'm reading people I'm talking to where you know the the the phrase that experts I think Ethan Mollik is one of the most famous from the Wharton Pennsylvania Business School. It's a jagged thing. AI is a really jagged thing and so some people are leaping forward with it and other people are leaping really backward with it and there's an anger um a rebellion even I I wrote an article about fobbo fear of becoming obsolete and so some people seem to understand that this is a really useful tool and they're angry about it and they think maybe they're even training their own replacement and so they're they're refusing to to work with it.
One of the main conclusions of the survey is that the the issue well one of the issues of AI adoption is that the the human friction is created by the the the employees rather than necessarily the limitation of the tools. What what do you make of that?
>> Uh, I think it really comes down to the the tool you're using and how it's been designed and then how you're prompting it and the you know it's kind of I've also heard the phrase garbage in garbage out and so if you are using the wrong tool with the wrong prompt with the wrong goal in mind you're just going to waste a lot of time and uh I think a lot of seues seem to be issuing top- down mandates to their companies to you know we want to see you guys using this. I' I've heard that in Silicon Valley, they're looking at tokens and if you're burning a lot of tokens, that means you're using a lot of AI and that's what they want to see. And they're not being very intentional around here's exactly how to use it to get the results you need to be good at your job. And so I think there's a gap in between those two things.
So would you say this is more of a story of a poor and hurried implementation from executives who are worried about being left behind like you say or is it a story of a reluctance from workers whose labor is being devalued by AI?
I've got a story coming out tomorrow, not to plug myself too much, but I talked to >> talked to KPMG, who I I work with or talk to quite a lot, and um just as a preview, the executive said there's a real there's a real hesitance to fail in a lot of companies. And the playing with these AI systems, um another expert told me that they're probabilistic, not deterministic. So you're not guaranteed to get the right answer a 100red times out of a hundred when you work with them. And just most companies aren't set up that way. Most 20th century capitalism wasn't set up that way. And there's a real mismatch there between really needing space to fail and experiment with these things and what companies are used to doing which is you give someone a job and they execute it and they get the right answer every time. So I feel like people are confused up and down the org chart right now.
>> There was another survey that I I was reading about today from workday which found that of the the time that was saved from using AI about 40% of it then goes back into >> to correcting the work that it produces. Do you think that is is kind of a bit of a bit of both camps maybe that AI is is is fine to use in low value repeatable tasks but it's not really ready for the the highv value tasks that might for example replace a job and also people implementing these AI tools for these highv value tasks not realizing or or not having had the training that it's actually ready to be used for that kind of thing yet.
>> Yeah. So, this story that we're talking about, I talked to Steve Hanky, who's an economics professor at John's Hopkins, and I was talking to him about other stuff, you know, the Iran war and the all the u the raw materials that are going to be disrupted in the supply chain. And then he just started saying, you know, AI, this thing was total bust. Uh like we got sold this whole bill of goods on this thing and it was going to make us that much more productive and it's just been kind of a pain instead. And then he said, "But I'm using it all the time and I think it's great." And I came on this journey where I went from no absolutely not to maybe a little bit to once I figured out what the right use case for it is. It's it it's great and it saves me so much time. He said I could send one of my research assistants to the library to look something up and they'd be there for a week and I'd be paying uh their invoices and stuff and I can just get that work done myself with my AI research assistant. But then we get back to that other issue, that existential issue where what about that research assistant in that job that won't exist when professor Hanky needs to needs to get this research done. So, uh I think it's I think that's the thing is that it was overhyped and then now it is really delivering in a in a marginal kind of way and it's just annoying to a lot of people at all walks of life. And uh Morgan Stanley was out with a note a couple days ago saying this is not a macro story across the economy, but we are starting to see some impact on jobs. Uh but jobs are changing how they're being done internally before we get to this huge disruption of uh of the workforce.
Sounds like a good time to talk about an analogy that you do use in in your article, which is you compare AI adoption to driving or being given a sports car. all employees being given a sports car and you you if you give every employee a sports car that doesn't mean that they'll necessarily be able to drive it or use it in an effective way and obviously the same could be said about AI but how far would you take that analogy because obviously race drivers take years of training for example and that's the same cannot be expected for the the countless employees mandated to use AI certainly as it's only been really mandated for the last few years at best.
>> that's a good question. I so I've been using this myself uh for a while and then I talked to Dan at WalkMe and he used the same metaphor and then another KPG leader their head of tax in the US he used the same metaphor and I thought oh everyone is seeing this the same way and um I do think that there's a bit of a revenge in this whole story of the 30some 40ome worker who has about 15 20 years of training and they know how to drive these things really quickly without crashing. But I'm also not too worried going forward about less experienced drivers, so to speak, because you know, I was talking to an executive and he said when you're looking at innovation, you want to talk to the youngest people. The youngest people are just most tuned in to what's changing in tech and they understand it in a way that us 40somes don't. And so, uh, I think they're going to be really good race car drivers. If I had to make a prediction,
>> there's something I I don't know if I must admit, I don't know if this applies in the US as well, but certainly in the UK, there's been a couple of headlines, which I do plan on talking about later this week, that Gen Z are actually the ones like looking to sabotage AI's sort of roll out in the workforce. May maybe partly because there's that threat to the to their work going forwards or their careers going forward should I say but is that approach do do you think that sort of reluctance that resentment that's already building towards AI might get in the way of some of these people taking it on or using AI in a more effective way in the future?
>> Yeah, I definitely see that too. And I think it will be Gen Z is a big generation and it's going to be pretty polarized and bifurcated and there's going to be power users and then there's going to be people who totally reject it. Um, we're getting into like sociology type stuff here like Gen Z. I've seen descriptions of them that they're sort of like the baby boomers in like the the hippie counterculture movement. And I could see a whole anti-AII counterculture over the next decade. uh among Gen Zers, but then I also think we're going to see the one man unicorn company um like one one man or one woman with 20 AI agents who build a billion-dollar business. Uh that's kind of where the direction some people think we're headed in Silicon Valley. So, you know, after all, Elon Musk is a Gen Xer, and uh he doesn't fit a lot of people's ideas of the, you know, Keanu Reeves uh Ethan Hawk Gen Xer from, uh the the movies back in the early 90s, you know. So, I think it'll be interesting, but I I think Gen Z is going to sabotage AI and then they're going to make it a big big thing at the same time.
How much do you think that this push back is is part of the responsibility of the the employers not really get just saying here's AI go use it and there not being any real well I'm sure there has been some but by and large certainly survey after survey has shown that there's not really been any proper training it's just been here's a tool you just talk to it like a person it'll do everything you want and then obviously that's not how it's worked out.
>> Yeah, I think that's part of it, but I also think however you feel about the government, and I know you're in the UK, I'm in the US, we have different government approaches to this thing, but if there was some kind of government backs stop to say everyone's safe, you guys are all safe. You're not going to be replaced by this stuff, and you should get to know it and use it and see it just as a tool instead of this existential thing that's going to change everything. um then I think that would create a different psychological uh reaction for people. Um I think people are very angry about this which is why this article struck a chord and why we're seeing similar reporting. Um and I think that that anger maybe says more about us as humans than it does about this technology.
If if you were to pick a a side on the two extremes, would it be the we're going to be headed for certainly America would be headed for the techno technofudalism camp or the technoutopian everybody doesn't have to work anymore can just do hobbies whatever they like.
You know, I talked to Giannis Varafakus, the Greek former finance minister who wrote a book about technofudalism, and it was a fascinating conversation, but he's also a Star Trek fan, and he believed in like a future where there is a world government, and uh we have more of a utopian outcome. And um I think I'm more in that camp. Also, like John Maynard Kanes predicted that we'd all have 15 hour work weeks by now, but it hasn't quite happened. And AI gives us the potential to do that, but there's a big political problem to sort through first with all that um all that abundance that gets created. And maybe that's what the anger is really about.
Fair enough. Uh OpenAI, I think I can't remember exactly what date it was, but the other week said or gave their their policy suggestions for basically how to shape our future society. But in the push for one of the things was a push for a 4-day work week. How how does the statistics that we see in in studies like this the the WalkMe one or or the one that I had mentioned earlier as well where there actually is okay you might you might be actually losing eight hours a week to friction from using AI.
>> Yeah.
And and those two things kind of seem very much at odds. You're you're spending an extra day rather than gaining an extra day in a lot of cases.
>> Yeah. I've I've looked at this too and there's data that shows that in the right hands AI is saving about eight hours of work and in the wrong hands it's wasting eight hours of work and so I think the big problem that every CEO is trying to fix right now is who are the right hands to be putting this technology in and it should be all of us but um there are gaps is what I could say in in terms of the the training and the the climate around this.
Do you think that goes some way to explain the the 80 88% of executives think their employees have the right tools to do their job compared to the 21% of employees that would agree with them?
>> Yeah, I think that's there's a I mean there's clearly a big mismatch between the boss and the worker right now. And then the other story that's bubbling through all this is people saying, "Hey, maybe the middle manager is is a thing of history." Like AI makes the middle manager a thing of the past because when you give AI tools to middle managers, they should be doing more stuff instead of managing other people's workflow. And I I go back and forth on this. I would like to think that a utopian future is ahead where in 20 years from now, our economy looks totally different from how it does now. And that could be a good thing. Um there will be a lot more jobs in uh health care probably a lot more jobs in leisure and services but I also think today's economy looks dramatically different from 20 years ago now and people are uncomfortable with change I think is the big thing that keeps coming up in this in this kind of reporting.
What do you think employers and executives can do to address that imbalance between the expectations of inhuman amounts of workload compared to the the reality of people not being able to achieve that?
>> I'm not a leadership expert. I just talk to them for a living. And I would really say that there's something about a little bit chilling out and giving people that freedom to experiment and that safe that space to experiment. I've heard the sandbox as a metaphor like give everyone a sandbox where they can play in and um let them know that it's okay to fail, but also let them know that it's not really optional to stick your head in the sand and just pretend that the world's not changing. Um, I think that's a a good balanced way to to go forward.
The CEO of WalkMe did did comment on this study as well, and he explained the survey by saying the issue is is not AI's capability, but essentially human usage and uptake of it. For many people watching this, they this will sound kind of like they're being blamed for the the shortfallings and the failings of AI. You're you're somebody that uses AI quite a lot with their work. What would you say to the these people that are are feeling blamed at the moment for a tech they don't even want to be using?
>> I would say that I've sort of become the face of this, which you're not supposed to do as a journalist, but that doesn't mean that I'm uncritical and uh completely in support of everything AI related. I've got my own le levels of discomfort with it. And in some ways, I felt like I had to be pushed into using it because of where I was in my life and career and where the industry that I work in was at. And so I would tell people to put their feelings a little bit to the side and look at what is in front of them and try to take a cold hard look in the mirror that way. and try to be as objective as possible because I I've got strong feelings about it too. We all have strong feelings right now. It's a pretty scary time in the world and I think you can't really disentangle that from a lot of these reactions. Um but it's to me it's just a technology and um I gave another interview recently where I said if we didn't call it AI and if we called it something else then I think people's reactions to it would be different. If we called it like mass information organizing tool, then people wouldn't be I mean we had a guy arrested in Silicon Valley for throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Alman's house and he had a apparently a whole manifesto about how he was going to go and commit crimes because he thinks AI will drive humanity to extinction. And that's pretty scary. And this thing to me is just kind of a new computer, a new web browser. And for people to be reacting this way is alarming.
I'm curious. You you said that you feel like in this stage of your career that you kind of had to use AI, and I I was just wondering why. What made you feel that way?
>> That's a great question. I would say it was what Fortune needed me to do and I had some experience with it already. Uh, I've talked a lot about how I encountered this at Bloomberg and some other places through the years and so it just felt like the stars aligned there in terms of what the company needed me to do and what I felt comfortable doing. And that's kind of to me that's a little bit the alchemy of how this is out of our hands. Like a company needs you to do something and you have certain skills and that's how the system works or doesn't work. And I would say to all the people who really hate AI, um, just think about it as a skill you can develop and use. Um, but that doesn't mean you have to love it.
It strikes me that whether the friction described in in the study that I feel a lot of people can relate to, whether that lies at the feet of of people or AI, there is a lot of worker resentment and apathy which has been deepened by the executive pressure to perform based on the promise of AI which none of us signed up for. I it feels like that needs to be addressed before not necessarily before nothing else can be looked at while that's happening but that employees are are worrying about their job security or the expectations of human levels of pro productivity which if they try and do has now been shown will burn them out that something needs to be done to address these sorts of fears as part of the not just the training on how to use AI.
>> Yeah. So I was reading a interview with Ben Sass who used to be a senator and now uh sadly has a a nasty case of cancer and uh they asked him for his reaction to the AI discourse and he said people are really reacting to what they dislike about humanity and uh AI is a bit of a roar shack test where it reflects ourselves back to ourselves and it's a very powerful tool and that means humans can use it to do very human things very quickly. And some of those things are good and some of them are bad. So I think these are huge huge issues that you know worker unrest, worker rebellion, worker dissatisfaction and insecurity. You're tapping into a big societywide question uh there. And so that needs to be resolved somehow. And we've lived through a very turbulent five to 10 years. And I think that the answer lies somewhere there. So that's that's a lot for any CEO to tackle. Um and that's a lot lot for any government to tackle too. But I feel a lot of this anger seems to be around just no one's trying right now. So if I think if workers felt like someone was trying to actually listen to them and their issues with this technology in this moment, um then the anger could come down a bit. But that's just my guess. I'm I'm I'm not super qualified to to to tackle that one.
Well, Nick Likenberg, thanks for taking the time.
>> Hey, thank you so much.
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