CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story
CEO们称AI正提高工作效率，员工说法却大相径庭
How much time workers say the technology saves them on the job is vastly different from what executives report
对于利用AI能节省多少工作时间，员工的说法与高管的报告大相径庭。
Lindsay Ellis
琳赛·埃利斯
Business leaders’ faith in the productivity-boosting powers of AI is getting a reality check – from their own workforces.
企业领袖们对人工智能（AI）提升生产力能力的信念正受到现实的检验——来自他们自己的员工。
Employees say AI isn’t saving them much time in their daily work so far, and many report feeling overwhelmed by how to incorporate it into their jobs. Companies, meanwhile, are spending vast amounts on artificial intelligence, betting that the technology’s power to speed everything from sales to back-office functions will usher in a new era of efficiency and profit growth.
员工们表示，到目前为止，AI在日常工作中并没有为他们节省多少时间，许多人还称，对于如何将AI融入工作感到不知所措。与此同时，企业正斥巨资投入AI，押注这项技术能为从销售到后台职能等一切事务提速，将开启一个效率和利润增长的新时代。
The gulf between senior executives’ and workers’ actual experience with generative AI is vast, according to a new survey from the AI consulting firm Section of 5,000 white-collar workers.
AI咨询公司Section对5,000名白领进行的一项新调查显示，高管与员工在生成式AI方面的实际体验存在巨大差异。
Two-thirds of nonmanagement staffers said they saved less than two hours a week or no time at all with AI. More than 40% of executives, in contrast, said the technology saved them more than eight hours of work a week.
三分之二的非管理层员工表示，他们每周通过AI节省的时间不到两小时，或者根本没有节省时间。相比之下，超过40%的高管表示，这项技术每周为他们节省了超过八小时的工作时间。
Executives “automatically assume AI is going to be the savior,” said Steve McGarvey, a user-experience designer in Raleigh, N.C. “I can’t count the number of times that I’ve sought a solution for a problem, asked an LLM, and it gave me a solution to an accessibility problem that was completely wrong,” he said, referring to a large language model.
北卡罗来纳州罗利市的用户体验设计师史蒂夫·麦加维（Steve McGarvey）说：“高管们想当然地认为AI会成为救世主。”他提到大语言模型时说：“我记不清有多少次，我为一个问题寻求解决方案，去问一个大语言模型，结果它给我的一个关于无障碍问题的解决方案完全是错的。”
McGarvey, 53 years old, said some specific use cases for AI – like using Perplexity as a research assistant – have saved him significant time. But part of his job is to ensure that visually impaired website users can access websites. He said he has spent several sessions explaining to an AI bot why a proposed solution won’t work.
现年53岁的麦加维说，AI的一些特定应用为他节省了大量时间，比如使用Perplexity作为研究助理。但他的一部分工作是确保视障网站用户的访问。他说，他已好几次要花时间向一个AI机器人解释为什么某个建议的解决方案行不通。
“Unless you have some judgment or discernment in the field you’re in, you could really do harm to a consumer base – or do harm within a team – just by assuming” that whatever an LLM says is factual, he said.
他表示：“除非你在自己所处的领域有一定的判断力和洞察力，否则如果假设大语言模型说的都是事实，你可能真的会给消费者群体带来伤害，或者在团队内部造成损害。”
Workers in the Section survey were far more likely to say they were anxious or overwhelmed about AI than excited – the reverse was true for the C-suite – and 40% of all respondents said they would be fine never using AI again. The most common way most people said they used AI tools was for basics like google-search replacements or generating drafts. Far fewer used it for more-complex tasks like data analysis or code generation.
在Section的调查中，表示对AI感到焦虑或不知所措的员工远多于感到兴奋的人，而高管层的情况则相反；40%的受访者还表示，让他们再也不用AI也无所谓。大多数人表示，他们使用AI工具最常见的方式是用于替代谷歌搜索或生成草稿等基本任务。很少有人用它来完成数据分析或代码生成等更复杂的任务。
A new report from the business-software company Workday goes so far as to call frustrations with the technology an “AI tax” on productivity. Though 85% of the roughly 1,600 employees it surveyed reported saving one to seven hours a week by using AI, much of the time was offset by having to correct errors and rework AI-generated content.
商业软件公司Workday的一份新报告甚至将对该技术的失望情绪称为生产力上的“AI税”。尽管在其调查的大约1,600名员工中，有85%的人称通过使用AI每周节省了一到七个小时，但其中大部分时间都被纠正错误和返工AI生成内容所抵消。
Some of the challenge is the uncertainty over what AI can do well or poorly, said Dan Hiester, a 44-year-old user-experience engineer in Seattle. Over the summer, Hiester turned to a large language model to fix some code, expecting that it would take less than a half-hour. It wound up taking the entire afternoon, he said. Meanwhile, another task that would have taken Hiester days in the past took him 20 minutes with generative AI.
西雅图44岁的用户体验工程师丹·希斯特（Dan Hiester）说，挑战之一在于不确定AI擅长什么、不擅长什么。他说，夏天的时候，希斯特曾求助于一个大语言模型来修复一些代码，原本预计用时不到半小时，结果却花了一整个下午。与此同时，另一项过去需要希斯特花费数天时间的任务，在生成式AI的帮助下，他只用了20分钟就完成了。
“It’s done a complete reset of my understanding of how to estimate the time it takes to do something,” Hiester said.
希斯特说：“这彻底颠覆了我对如何估算做事时间的理解。”
Whatever changes AI is bringing to business operations and jobs, chief executives said that isn’t translating to the bottom line yet. In a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of chief executives presented at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week, 12% said AI had delivered both cost and revenue benefits. More than half of the nearly 4,500 CEOs polled worldwide said they have seen no significant financial benefit so far.
无论AI给企业运营和工作岗位带来什么变化，首席执行官们表示，这些变化尚未体现在净利润上。在本周于瑞士达沃斯举行的世界经济论坛（World Economic Forum）年会上，普华永道（PricewaterhouseCoopers）发布了一项对首席执行官的调查，其中12%的人表示AI带来了成本和收入双重效益。在全球近4,500名受访CEO中，超过一半的人表示，到目前为止还没有看到任何显著的财务效益。
Some companies have already reported ambitious AI efforts that later required humans to help. The payment provider Klarna leaned on AI in 2024 to replace the work of hundreds of outsourced customer service agents. Later, the company pivoted again, hiring about a dozen human gig workers to answer more-challenging queries.
一些公司已经报告了雄心勃勃的AI项目，但后来仍需要人工协助。支付服务提供商Klarna在2024年依靠AI取代了数百名外包客服人员的工作。后来，该公司再次调整策略，雇佣了十几名零工来回答更具挑战性的问题。
At Duolingo, the language-learning app, Chief Executive Luis von Ahn told staff in a memo last year that it would “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle.”
在语言学习应用多邻国（Duolingo），首席执行官路易斯·冯·安（Luis von Ahn）去年在一份内部通知中告诉员工，公司将“逐步停止使用承包人员来做AI可以处理的工作”。
He later said that he expected to keep hiring but that AI would “accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality.” The company wound up with a 14% higher head count year over year, von Ahn wrote on LinkedIn.
冯·安后来表示，他预计会继续招聘，但AI将“以相同或更高的质量水平，加速我们所做的事情”。他在领英（LinkedIn）上写道，该公司最终员工总数同比增长了14%。
Six of 10 respondents to a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll last summer characterized AI and other new technologies as mostly a threat to the U.S. economy because of its potential to replace well-paid workers. The rest said they believed it would lead to new products and higher productivity.
在去年夏天《华尔街日报》（The Wall Street Journal）和NORC的一项民意调查中，60%的受访者将AI和其他新技术主要定性为对美国经济的威胁，因为它有可能取代高薪工人。其余的人则认为，这将带来新产品和更高的生产力。
“People are skeptical,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) said at a recent Washington, D.C., event focused on preparing the American workforce for AI. Broad-based efforts to support workers in getting AI training would help make them more willing to learn and use the technology, he said.
“人们持怀疑态度，” 亚利桑那州民主党人参议员马克·凯利（Mark Kelly）最近在华盛顿特区一场旨在帮助美国劳动者为AI做好准备的活动上说。他表示，广泛支持员工接受AI培训的努力将有助于让他们更愿意学习和使用这项技术。
“If industry earns public trust in AI from workers, adoption will increase and the companies will reap the productivity increases,” Kelly said.
凯利说：“如果行业能从员工那里赢得公众对AI的信任，那么AI的采用率就会提高，公司也将获得生产力的提升。”
