If there is one defining trend across the corporate world over the past few years, it has been the race to adopt AI. Across almost every sector, executives have scrambled to adopt agentic technologies into their teams’ workflows, tempted by promises of increased productivity, lower headcounts, and a better share price.
Yet as these technologies enter the average employee's toolkit, they could have long-term ramifications for their users. Recent research has found that a reliance on AI tools could, in fact, be diminishing the critical-thinking skills many employees were hired for and harming their ability to spot misinformation.
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- AI Adoption Is Stalling – And Consumers Are Why
- The Missing Link in AI Adoption? PwC’s Gamification Strategy
What Impact Does AI Use Have on Employees?
We can’t yet fully understand what long-term effects AI usage will have on the user (rather like Ozempic). Generative AI only entered the mainstream in late 2022 with the public release of ChatGPT, followed by Claude. In those three and a half years, mass adoption of AI soared, with 50% of employees now using AI tools at work in some capacity.
These technologies have undoubtedly offered significant productivity boosts for many employees. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that generative AI users saved an average of 5.4% in weekly work hours. Research by the Harvard Business School also found that AI users completed tasks 25.1% faster and produced output 40%+ higher in quality than those who didn’t use AI.
The productivity gains for CX teams have been particularly impressive. Customer support agents using an AI tool can handle 13.8% more inquiries per hour than agents without AI assistance, while reducing CX operational costs by 30%.
However, the long-term effects on individual employee performance are increasingly in question. Perhaps the more thinking AI undertakes, the less capable employees are of thinking for themselves…
How Does AI Impact Critical Thinking?
A troubling picture is emerging as researchers investigate the cognitive impact of generative AI. Recent research conducted by the MIT Media Lab found that heavy reliance on AI affected people’s ability to identify misinformation and discern fake headlines and images from real ones. Given the business risks posed by AI hallucinations, this is a worrying prospect, particularly for CX teams who regularly handle large volumes of data on a daily basis.