Workplace AI: The chatty new colleague
Meet your new co-worker, the chatbot, said Alex Kantrowitz in Slate. A new wave of corporate AI tools from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google is hitting the market, with promises to “change the workday for the better,” perhaps even make it possible to essentially “be in two places at once.” Microsoft’s Copilot “will live prominently in Windows 11, Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365,” where it will automatically “simplify and automate some of the worst parts of office life.” Copilot can transcribe meetings, summarize long emails, or create snappy header images for a slide deck. Google, too, is connecting its AI program, Bard, to Gmail to function almost like a personal assistant. Used properly, these innovations can really “help cut down on the meaningless work that fills the typical workday.”
Just make sure “ChatGPT in a suit” isn’t going to get you fired, said Matthew S. Smith in IEEE Spectrum. “Using AI to generate a presentation might save time, but the engineer would be smart to verify that the data in the presentation is correct.” AI tools can backfire in other ways too. Samsung, for instance, had to “block employees from accessing ChatGPT in May 2023 after finding at least two engineers had used it to troubleshoot confidential code”—sharing the code with OpenAI in the process.
It’s true that “AI at work remains a double-edged sword,” but the potential value is real, said Ryan Heath in Axios. In one study, 758 management consultants at a major firm were asked to come up with ideas for a new product, and to analyze a company’s problems using data and executive interviews. Some consultants were given access to AI, others not. In developing products, AI came up with “novel and unexpected” capabilities and improved the work—especially for consultants who got guidance on how to engineer prompts. On the other task, though, AI made the work worse, and mistakes more common. The lesson: When you turn to AI, make sure you’re asking the questions it’s suited to answering.
The next stage in workplace AI is going to be “replacement anxiety,” said Julia Hobsbawm in Bloomberg. “AI can already do many jobs better than humans, such as form filling, blurb writing, and assessing X-rays.” A lot of those seem like useful timesavers. But what’s really starting to spook office workers is that AI is showing promise at tasks like developing ideas—exactly the kinds of things we think of as distinctly human expertise. We are used to technology taking over jobs lower down the pecking order. But for the first time, we’re in “a new era in which whitecollar professional workers are directly threatened.”