Roundup: Businesses Juggle Productivity, Employee Concern on GenAI

The key to succeeding with AI is education, but employers’ efforts are stalled.

Many, if not most, businesses are stalled in their efforts to educate employees on the use of generative AI to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Yet those very efforts are key to increasing productivity and accelerating the growth and execution of their business strategies.

Research by the Institute for Corporate Productivity, or i4cp, found that training sets apart the companies that successfully operationalize AI. With additional training, they believe, they could improve their productivity by more than 30%. Companies that are still experimenting with AI believe training would increase their productivity by 10% to 30%.

Companies operationalizing AI focus their learning and upskilling on all levels of the workforce. They are 2.5 times more likely than those which are only experimenting to train their executives on GenAI. They’re three times more likely to say their executives use GenAI.

“[The] productivity gap between companies capitalizing on AI and scaling their efforts and those merely experimenting with it is rapidly increasing,” said i4cp CEO Kevin Oakes. “While the largest percentage (41%) of companies are still experimenting with GenAI, a growing number (11%) of organizations have now operationalized the capability, actively scaling AI applications across departments, restructuring processes and workflows…and doing this by offering AI-related training to most or all employees.”

The number of HR departments using generative AI has more than doubled since 2023, from 22% to 41%, the report said.

The research also found that workers in companies that are scaling AI are the most nervous about being replaced by the technology. “We believe it's clear that the more familiar you become with the power of AI, the realization sets in that AI is likely to be able to conduct many tasks and even functions more effectively in the long term,” said Oakes.

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