I am curious if the timing have impacted the inability to measure a benefit. AI is rolling out at the same time as widespread return to office campaigns. Remote work was widely studied and touted as improving efficiency, but no one is showing the drop for RTO. Is AI in part just balancing it out? There's also an ongoing massive brain drain. Many companies are either laying off their most tenured and competent employees, or they are making life miserable for them in the hopes that they quit.
All of this said, using AI in your back end takes a huge amount of time from your users and employees. You have to vary multiple prompts, you have to make the output sane, touch it up, etc. The most useful part of AI for me has been using it to learn something new, or push through a task that I otherwise couldn't do. I was able to partially rewrite a logging window to reduce CPU use significantly. It took me over two weeks of back and forth with AI to figure out a workable solution and implement it into the software. I competent programmer probably could have done it better than I did in less than an hour. There's no business benefit to a help desk person being able to spend 2 weeks writing code that an engineer would be much better suited to handling. But maybe that engineer could write it in 10 minutes instead of an hour if they used AI to understand the software first.
Problem is with RTO is companies aren't getting the benefit of using AI to manage all their internal knowledge. Bringing people back into the office defeats the purpose of having this central "worker" who can answer queries, point people in the right direction etc. People will just fallback on shouting across the office and scheduling pointless meetings.
Really companies failed to make remote work because it meant giving up a lot of middle-management power and some people realising their job means very little.
Likely, no. In my industry, I see a fraction of ICs using it well, a fraction of leadership using it for absolute dog shit idea generation, and the remainder using it to make their jobs easier in the short run, while incurring debt in the long run since nobody is "learning" from AI summaries and most people don't seem to be reading the generated "AI notes" sent in emails.
By and large, I think AI is going to hurt my workplace based on the current trajectory, but it won't be realized until we are in a hard hole to dig out of.
All of this said, using AI in your back end takes a huge amount of time from your users and employees. You have to vary multiple prompts, you have to make the output sane, touch it up, etc. The most useful part of AI for me has been using it to learn something new, or push through a task that I otherwise couldn't do. I was able to partially rewrite a logging window to reduce CPU use significantly. It took me over two weeks of back and forth with AI to figure out a workable solution and implement it into the software. I competent programmer probably could have done it better than I did in less than an hour. There's no business benefit to a help desk person being able to spend 2 weeks writing code that an engineer would be much better suited to handling. But maybe that engineer could write it in 10 minutes instead of an hour if they used AI to understand the software first.