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ZDNET Highlights
- Despite large-scale AI adoption, workers’ confidence in the technology fell.
- One reason for this could also be lack of training.
- Companies are looking for ways to reduce frustration.
For every process or workflow where AI saves time and increases efficiency, there are half a dozen that make Tabby Farrar’s team feel like the technology is useless.
Farrar is Head of Search at UK-based SEO and web design agency Candor. Digital marketing, like almost every other industry, is a hotly debated topic of AI. And although their teams are eager to embrace the benefits of working faster and more efficiently and recoup time spent on less interesting tasks, it doesn’t always work that way.
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AI can generate product lifestyle imagery for customers who don’t have any, but it hallucinates or misses key points when creating executive summaries of the data. Refining a hint to help assign categories in a dataset could take so much time, Farrar might as well have done this manually.
“As a manager, I’m trying to engage the team more with AI stuff, because it’s the future of many industries,” Farrar said. On the other hand, “there are a lot of people coming in like, ‘I’ve wasted two hours of my day trying to make this thing work.'”
Farrar and his team aren’t the only ones who are widening the gap between the promise of AI and what it can actually do — and perhaps losing faith along the way.
Employee anxiety will cause real problems
A January study from workforce solutions firm ManpowerGroup found that for the first time in three years, Workers’ confidence in AI diminishedA decline of 18% while adoption increased by 13% year over year. Deviations in those numbers may not only indicate that the honeymoon phase with AI is over, but also serve as a warning to organizations about how they implement AI tools in the workplace.
Mara Stephen, vice president of global insights for ManpowerGroup, said, “You can’t have an fearful workforce and not be fully productive. That anxiety is going to create real problems.”
Other studies present a similar picture of disconnection. A November EY report found that when 9 out of 10 employees use AI at workOnly 28% of organizations can convert this into “high-value results.”
“Our research shows why: Employees may be saving a few hours here and there, but nothing that fundamentally changes how work is done or how the business performs,” the report said.
For some, trying to stem this decline in worker confidence is taking on a part-time job.
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Randall Tinfo, CEO of REACHUM, an AI-powered learning platform based in Scranton, PA, estimates that he spends about 20 hours of his 70-hour work week investigating AI tools and partners so as not to indiscriminately impose them on his employees.
While platforms like Cloud Code are saving software developers significant amounts of time, not everything is as effective. Tinfo sees a disparity between how some AI tools are marketed and what they can actually do.
Even working in a company based on AI, Tinfo’s team has faced problems in tasks like text generation in images, where some AI tools were not working.
“There’s so much noise, and I don’t want our team to be distracted by it, so I’m the one who will look at something, decide if it’s worthwhile or garbage, and then give it to the team to work on,” Tinfo said.
inspire confidence
Misalignment of expectations and reality can be a major cause of declining confidence, said Kristin Ginn, founder of trnsfrmAItn, an organization that works with companies on AI adoption, with a focus on the human workforce involved.
It all sounds simple from a marketing demo, but business leaders need to make sure employees understand the trial-and-error and refinements that may lie ahead.
There is also a psychological element at work in this. The ManpowerGroup study found that 89% of respondents feel comfortable in their current role. Many people have done their work in the same way for a long time.
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“If you’re now starting to look at how you can use AI for the same task, you suddenly have to put in a lot more mental effort trying to figure out how to do it in a completely different way,” Ginn said. “That loss of routine, confidence of how I’m doing it, it can also go back to human nature to avoid change.”
Additionally, Stephen discussed the role of adequate training in maintaining self-confidence. More than half of respondents (56%) reported no recent training or access to mentorship (57%).
“Organizations and companies that figure out how to address this, how to make employees feel better about the use, training and context of technology…those are the organizations that are going to benefit the most,” Stephen said.
looking for gems
Back at digital marketing agency Candor, Farrar said the company has a variety of strategies in place to help balance the pursuit of innovation with the day-to-day challenges of technology, which still has a way to go.
Kander has built in extra time to account for the fact that everyone is learning, framed experiments as “test and learn” to reduce stress, and appointed a “champion” to stay abreast of developments in AI. The agency’s chief marketing officer has led training sessions, and Farrar also has regular check-ins with his team. She also talks openly with him about feeling disappointed at times.
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And some efforts have proven fruitful, such as the creation of Gemini Gem, trained on brand and tone-of-voice guidelines that can generate quotes that the client can modify and approve for use in media. Candor’s innovation lead is building tools that will specifically meet a company’s needs, using APIs from companies like OpenAI. Farrar explained how quickly his approach to AI images changed after the launch of Google’s Nano Banana – for the better.
Still, there is a long road ahead.
Farrar said, “If I’m going to leave some of my work on this equipment, I want to trust that it will do as good a job as I do.”
