Chatbots Are Rewriting How We Work Today

Old jobs, new jobs, more jobs?

The expected productivity and profit boost that automated tech could help deliver are already leading businesses to think about what they’ll expect from their human employees as soon as this year.

MIT’s Sloan School of Management partnered with the Boston Consulting Group and found that generative AI can improve performance by as much as 40% for highly skilled workers compared with those who don’t use it. Software engineers can code up to twice as fast using gen AI tools, according to studies cited by the Brookings Institute.

LinkedIn surveyed CIOs, CEOs, data scientists, software engineers and other heavy data users and asked them to use generative AI to see how much time they saved on tasks such as drafting emails, analyzing text and creating documents. What they said is that tasks that would now take them 10 hours manually could take them five to six hours less. That translates into spending 50% to 60% less time on some routine tasks so you can instead devote attention to more rewarding or higher-value work.

Most Americans (82%) haven’t even tried ChatGPT and over half say they’re more concerned than excited by the increased use of AI in their daily life, according to the Pew Research Center. Researchers there have started identifying jobs that may be affected in some way by generative AI. They include budget analysts, tax preparers, data entry keyers, law clerks, technical writers and web developers. Think roles whose tasks include “getting information” and “analyzing data or information,” Pew said.

Before you start worrying that AI will eat all the jobs, Goldman Sachs cautions that such concerns may be overblown, since new tech has historically ushered in new kinds of jobs. In a widely cited March 2023 report, the firm noted that 60% of today’s workers are employed in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940.