Employers around the globe are grappling with the fallout from rushing to adopt fast-changing artificial intelligence tools. Meta has scaled back plans to axe staff and use more AI agents after the company found employees were spending more and more time cleaning up technical and security errors, reported. And after thinning its workforce, especially middle managers, in a 2023 efficiency push, the company is expanding its managerial ranks again, LinkedIn posts from workers show.
At Microsoft, which rolled out AI widely internally, executive vice-president Ryan Roslansky recently publicly lamented the prevalence of AI slop in his day-to-day work. After receiving “what was clearly an AI-generated doc” from a co-worker, he used his AI to summarize it and came away with no new thinking about the idea, he said. He warned his followers against falling into this potential “doom loop”, where AI does the reading and writing and leaves behind an “ocean of sameness”.
Meanwhile, Walmart store and warehouse employees are being plagued by unreasonable expectations, errors and false alerts from AI tools that assign tasks, schedules and monitor performance, Business Insider reported. Employers are navigating a flood of errors and low-quality work that are sapping employee time, raising privacy and security risks and pushing up costs. Now, some businesses that started off fast and furious on AI are pumping the brakes, implementing restrictions where experimentation was once encouraged, bringing back experienced workers and upping training efforts.
C-suite leaders say when it comes to AI, there’s a sense that “we’re driving the truck and building it at the same time, and that’s a problem,” said Johnny C Taylor Jr, president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management. And an Ernst & Young survey published last month found that 36% of senior AI executives at companies with at least $1bn in annual revenue reported an AI incident that led to issues including data loss, financial damage, brand damage or operational disruptions. Firms from Microsoft to McKinsey are limiting usage for employees, as the flood of new tools and rapacious consumption weighs on bottom lines.
Others, such as Palantir, Booz Allen Hamilton and Nvidia, are restricting employee use over growing concerns about the security of their organizations’ data with AI companies, reported. Microsoft and Walmart declined to comment. Meta, Palantir, Nvidia and Booz Allen Hamilton did not respond to requests for comment.
Just 45% of managers said they felt “equipped to effectively lead AI natives”. Many workers feel “like they’re being asked to make use of these tools without any guidance about how they best could be deployed”, said Zack Mabel, director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Meanwhile, managers are balancing orders to “roll this out, find productivity gains and don’t compromise on quality”, he added.
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