Most of us get the same basic questions in employee performance reviews, even if we work completely different jobs: What did you accomplish last year? What opportunities do you have for improvement? But, this is something you may not have seen before: How do you use generated AI at work?
Such a question could be the next performance review for at least one employer. Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke said in a memo posted online and reported online that e-commerce software companies using AI in the workplace are no longer optional, with the company hiring about 8,100 employees by the end of 2024.
“Efficient use of AI is now a basic expectation for everyone in Shopify,” Luke wrote in the memo.
Gen AI tools such as Openai's Chatgpt and Google's Gemini are increasingly touted as game changers in offices, with business leaders saying they can improve employee efficiency. At the same time, this shift has raised concerns that these tools will replace humans, thus reducing work. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 64% of U.S. adults expect AI growth to lead to less work.
Shopify is a company that emphasizes AI in the workplace, but it is not the only one. What happens when your boss adds “Use AI” to your job responsibilities?
Will AI lead to reduced work at work?
Lutke’s memo highlights the importance of Shopify’s employees tinkering with AI and articulating certain requirements, including sharing their knowledge about using AI tools. He also said the team needed to demonstrate why AI could not meet the needs before asking for more resources or hiring new employees.
The memorandum clearly demonstrates one potential impact of AI Gen Gen on the usability of the job: if AI can do the job, companies will be less willing to hire.
The fear is widely shared rather than surpassing its impact on AI on work, according to another Pew survey published in February, which focuses on Americans’ ideas about AI at work.
Despite widespread fear, Nicole Sahin, CEO and founder of GP, a global employment and relationship company, told me she still sees the company hiring workers in line with expectations of the growing labor market.
“Companies are definitely hiring people, and they can't find enough talent,” she said. “I don't think hiring is slowing down.”
Perhaps what is changing is that people employed to do the type of work that can be done with AI tools are hired based on their ability to be creative and versatile through the technology, Sahin said.
When AI expects to be at work
Sahin said the Shopify memo and its expectations for AI use were “the beginning of a new normal.” GP released a survey this week that surveyed more than 3,000 global executives and HR professionals, with 91% of executives reporting that they have expanded their AI efforts in the company’s companies.
Sarkin said she believes the problem is a question of companies expecting workers to try and make it through technology creativity. “It is very important to be agile,” she said.
Experts say the growing use of AI in the workplace is changing the skills needed for employees to thrive. Many workers, including those in entry-level positions, need to rely more on subject expertise and judgment than skills to accomplish tasks through AI tools.
Most workers in a Pew Pew survey in February said they don’t use AI chatbots at all or rarely use them, with only 16% reporting using AI.
Even young workers usually don't use AI at work. A survey released this week by Gallup asked Gen Z adults about using AI in the workplace. Only 30% say they use it for work, and more than half say their workplaces do not have formal AI policies. The survey found that 29% said their jobs did not exist, and 36% said the risks outweighed the benefits of their jobs.
Just because you can or use AI at work doesn't mean it's worth it. A report from the coastal area of consulting firms this month found that half of the business leaders surveyed said they did not see measurable return on investment for AI, with only 21% reporting proven results. The coastal areas attribute the gap between hype and results to the disconnection between experiments and strategies.
“If there is no clear business uniformity or definition of results, AI may stay in the 'interesting but isolated' category,” the Coastal Report said.
Problems with AI work
AI systems like Chatgpt may be able to produce answers to a wide variety of queries, but they do not answer these questions like humans do. First, they are prone to mistakes called hallucinations – essentially constituting something, rather than admitting that they don't know the answer.
This makes it correct to use AI wisely and not trust its answer. In particular, large common language models, such as Chatgpt, are trained with a lot of data and are not all related to your work.
These models “really shouldn’t be used for work,” Saen said. “When you think about using AI in your business, it doesn’t hallucinate, it doesn’t get the problem wrong.”
In the workplace, the professional tools you want are less likely to hallucinate and are easier to verify and correct. Workers need to be able to detect these problems and solve them in order to use AI well.
At Shopify, learning these skills is only part of the job, Lutke wrote. “Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to choose not to learn the skills of applying AI in your crafts; you’re welcome to try AI, but honestly, I can’t see that I can’t see this today and definitely not tomorrow.”
