Dive Brief:
- About 4 in 10 business leaders have laid off employees as a result of deploying AI — and of those, 55% admit they made the wrong decisions about it, according to a recent survey of more than 1,000 business leaders by organizational design and planning software platform Orgvue.
- Leaders also admitted to a lack of awareness on how to implement AI. One quarter said they didn’t know which roles would benefit most from AI, nearly a third didn’t know which are most at risk for automation, and 35% said lack of AI expertise was a barrier to successful deployment.
- Despite these gaps, leaders remain bullish on AI, the survey showed; 3 in 4 leaders said their company would be “taking full advantage” of AI by the end of the year, and 4 in 5 said they’d increase their investments this year.
Dive Insight:
Fearful of being left behind, employers have leaned heavily into AI over the past year.
Part of that approach has been a zeal for replacing humans with AI. Earlier this month, Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, sent a memo to employees informing them new workers would not be hired unless teams could “demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.” In a similar memo, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman warned employees that AI would be “coming for” them if they did not become “exceptional.”
“It does not make sense to hire more people before we learn how to do more with what we have,” Kaufman wrote.
Some employers have taken the AI enthusiasm a step beyond hiring freezes by cutting current workers. Design platform Canva, for example, recently made headlines when it cut 10 technical writers nine months after directing them to start using AI tools whenever possible.
Orgvue’s study shows employers who move too quickly to reduce headcount may come to regret the decision.
“We’re facing the worst global skills shortage in a generation and dismissing employees without a clear plan for workforce transformation is reckless,” Oliver Shaw, CEO of Hirevue, said in a statement. “Some leaders are waking up to the fact that partnership between people and machines requires an intentional upskilling program if they’re to see the productivity gains that AI promises.”
Survey after survey have shown that workers, while anxious about the implications of AI, are willing to adopt the technology and are starting to use it. However, a lack of guardrails, training and clear policies around its usage mean they could be endangering themselves or their companies. A new KPMG survey showed that more than half of workers who are using AI admit to making mistakes in their work with the technology, 44% are “knowingly using it improperly” at work, and nearly half admitted to uploading sensitive company data and intellectual property to public AI platforms.
“While it’s encouraging to see investment in AI continue to grow, businesses need a better understanding of how the technology will change their workforce in the coming months and years,” Shaw said.
