Workers Spend As Much Time 'Botsitting' AI As Producing Useful Work, Survey Finds (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0183878062
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/06/15/0117225/workers-spend-as-much-time-botsitting-ai-as-producing-useful-work-survey-finds
- Source link: https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/ai-cutting-hours-office-creating-100000614.html
"Most people don't realize the amount of time that they're spending working on the tools to get the time savings that they're professing," said Paul Leonardi, Duca Family professor of technology management at UC Santa Barbara."
> Leonardi is one of the co-authors of the [2]new study published by the Work AI Institute , whose contributors include academics from Stanford University and UC Berkeley. The institute is sponsored by AI company Glean... The research surveyed 6,000 digital workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia between December and January. The report found that we are in a phase of significant personal productivity gains, but few companies are translating these gains into revenue and business growth. While 75% of individuals reported a boost in productivity, only 13% of the organizations say they have seen significant business gains as a result of AI adoption, the survey found...
>
> The reason the boost in productivity sometimes leads to waste, Leonardi said, is the time people spend correcting the bot's work and gathering the right files, documentation, and tacit knowledge required for it to produce high-quality output. "It's pretty striking the amount of time and effort people are spending," Leonardi said. Most employees now spend over six hours a week of their workday babysitting their work chatbots, the survey said. There is a "thick, mostly invisible layer of human labor holding the whole thing together," the report said. The survey found that for every hour a worker spends getting useful output from AI, they spend roughly another hour making it usable. Of the total time workers spend interacting with AI each week, 37% goes to botsitting, 36% to actually using the tool to produce work.
>
> Part of the reason so much time disappears into botsitting is how often the tools fall short: Workers report that more than a third of AI sessions fail outright, requiring a full restart or substantial rework. Paradoxically, as more workers hand over bigger parts of their jobs to AI, they are offloading personal judgment and responsibilities to the bots. The survey found 41% of workers say they sometimes deliver AI-generated work they couldn't explain if asked... "I think what's happening with a lot of these Gen AI tools right now is we're essentially expecting individual contributors to act as managers," Leonardi said. "They're just managing these AI tools, AI agents, and we're expecting that they'll be able to produce way more, but we're not taking into account all of the work that actually goes into managing."
>
> This problem isn't likely to go away.
[1] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/ai-cutting-hours-office-creating-100000614.html
[2] https://www.glean.com/work-ai-institute/reports/work-ai-index-report
Starting with the assumption that AI is faster (Score:3)
and then I always realize afterwards that I did spent a lot of time making it actually work.
Not to talk about the nasty bugs and the lack of error handling.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. Executives are *so* sure that AI is 5x to 10x faster, that any measurements to the contrary are disbelieved.
After all, these executives have *all* seen how well Claude can spit out a PowerPoint that looks great, they think it *must* be just as good at coding! Never mind that those PowerPoints they just generated, are usually not effective at communicating their points because they have so much fluff that doesn't matter. And never mind that if the PowerPoint is wrong in some small way, it doesn't ac
"tedious old chores" (Score:2)
> it is relieving workers of tedious old chores but creating new ones
If it were relieving workers of tedious old chores, it'd probably be more popular.
From what I can see it's doing the fun parts and leaving the shit parts - us checking it did it correctly - to us.
I went into programming because I enjoyed programming. I would imagine that's true of 99% of programmers. You know what's boring? Checking the code afterwards.
Maybe if the genAI companies found ways to use their technology to automate actual ch
Several ways to look at this (Score:2)
1. This extra time is just that we are new to this. As we get more experience and better at it (in conjunction with the tools improving) the time taken will decrease.
2. This extra time is just par for the course (as the last sentence in the summary seems to hint at, though no explanation as to why which it would have been good to see) and once increases in price for tokens over time are factored in it will cost the same amount (or more) for the same output (however now you are also seeing the hidden cost i
The reaaon this doesnt surprise me (Score:2)
I am convinced my last two email support requests were answered by bots because neither one were able to address or answer my question directly not to mention the writing style was off. Instead of getting to the point, we just kept going in circles with new suggestions that made no sense while never addressing my questions on the previous suggestions. These companies are wasting my time and will not do business with them anymore.
Not bot sitting (Score:2)
Training. They are still accumulating data needed to train the models. Also I don't think there's yet enough computing power for the LLMs to really work the way that the technology is capable of. As more and more data centers come online and more and more houses go offline as far as having electricity then I think you'll see the bots taking over. And by the bots I mean the people who actually own them. Epstein Islanders
Re: (Score:1)
That would be true if the technology followed the fabled narrative that the epstein island class want it to.
It actually doesn't work like that though, and no amount of Peter Thiel building a device to justify his childish paranoia will change the fact that inference is not deduction. The false positives will become too hard to hide soon... and when that happens the narrative is going to be pretty hard to control.
It's entirely possible that the class of people they are trying to distract and keep in denial i