Job seekers call BS on the workplace AI revolution

Survey respondents doubt it boosts performance or even lightens the load

Despite all the top-down buzz around enterprise AI, most job seekers are unconvinced that it is making their work lives easier.

As part of a larger study into the state of job hunting in 2024, CV pushing platform Resume Genius looked at attitudes toward AI among 1,000 US job seekers and found that 69 percent doubt AI's ability to boost their work performance, while 62 percent lack faith in AI's capacity to reduce their workload.

Consistent with the majority opinion that AI in the workplace has failed to impress, only 34 percent of respondents said they were worried about being replaced by a bot, while just 30 percent think AI will increase competition for jobs or harm salaries.

Broken down by generation (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z job seekers all responded), the results are largely the same, with even Gen Z workers skeptical of the latest "next big thing" in enterprise tech.

In short, Resume Genius's findings align with other recent studies suggesting enterprise AI's hype has not lived up to its marketing promises.

Nobody wants this except sales teams

One need not go far to find copious evidence of the lack of enthusiasm among workers for enterprise AI – we've covered it plenty on The Register.

Back in July, we covered a study into AI usage in the workplace by Upwork, which found that 77 percent of employees pushed to use AI productivity tools at work have ended up less productive. Many employees report feeling pressured by management to use AI tools into which their employer has sunk money, with 65 percent saying they're struggling to satisfy increased demands that bosses expect AI to help them meet.

That's not to say workers wouldn't be willing to embrace AI, with Adobe (itself marketing an enterprise AI tool) finding in a September study that 80 percent of workers would do so if it could actually save them time.

Of course, reality appears to differ when the rubber meets the road, with AI data services firm Appen releasing a report last month that found the return on investment (ROI) for AI projects has declined and few investments reach deployment.

While Appen attributes much of this to a lack of good training data, Gartner suggested in May that "difficulty in estimating and demonstrating the value of AI projects" was the primary obstacle to successful AI adoption.

In other words, while the C-suite is won over by glossy presentations and hype from companies like Microsoft, with its "Copilot everywhere" attitude, it's not paying off in actual usage.

Whether AI vendors will take notice of such shortcomings is doubtful. Microsoft certainly hasn't. Redmond increased prices on Copilot by 5 percent when introducing monthly billing options last week that still include a year commitment. Meanwhile, employees seem unsatisfied with the tools being pushed on them. Hopefully things will get better before AI makes them worse. ®