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With consumers roundly panning generative AI slop wherever it’s found, tech companies have set their sights on a more captive audience as a source of revenue: the world’s boardrooms and cubicle farms. But the office, it turns out, is also failing to provide fertile ground for its overtures.
A new survey by the SAP-owned software company WalkMe of 3,750 executives and employees found a major discontent growing in large companies across the globe. According to the findings, 54 percent of workers reported avoiding their company’s in-house AI tools in order to complete tasks themselves. A full third of workers reported never using AI at all.
The survey also identified a massive rift between workers and their bosses when it comes to AI. While 61 percent of executives surveyed said they trust the tech for complex, “business-critical” decisions, only nine percent of workers said the same.
A further 88 percent of corporate bigwigs expressed confidence that the AI tools they forced on their workers were adequate — while only 21 percent of workers agreed.
That cognitive disconnect isn’t just a sentiment issue. The WalkMe survey also found that, though 81 percent of executives think their AI deployments have “significantly improved productivity,” their workers are actually wasting eight hours per week cleaning up after AI’s messes, which is the equivalent of 51 work days a year.
Those findings mark a drastic uptick from last year’s WalkMe survey, which showed workers were losing 36 days a year dealing with AI friction.
“AI didn’t deliver,” Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke told Fortune about the findings. “Welcome to the real world. Forget the AI bubble. You know, it didn’t deliver. You look at all the surveys and yeah, everybody’s using it a little bit, but you dig into it and it hasn’t done much.”
“Productivity, by the way, it was weak,” Hanke continued. “If AI delivered, productivity would be way up. You listen to these Silicon Valley guys and they say we’re gonna have GDP going to 5 percent [or] 6 percent. Productivity is gonna go up to six. It’s just not happening.”
The results are just more fuel for the AI skeptics’ already-towering bonfire. In August of last year, an often-cited MIT study found that 95 percent of AI deployments in the workplace had failed to generate the expected return on investment.
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