Asger Risom
New survey questions AI’s real impact on productivity
Company leaders keep promising that artificial intelligence will make work faster and easier. Many employees, however, say their day-to-day experience looks very different.
A new survey highlights a widening gap between how executives and workers view AI’s impact on productivity, exposing growing frustration inside modern workplaces.
A widening gap
The findings come from a survey of 5,000 white-collar workers conducted by consulting firm Section and reported by The Wall Street Journal. It found that 40 percent of non-managers said AI saved them no time at all during a typical week.
Only two percent of those workers said AI saved them more than 12 hours. By contrast, executives reported far bigger gains, with 19 percent saying the technology saved them more than 12 hours weekly, and just two percent saying it saved no time.
The results suggest leaders are far more optimistic about AI’s benefits than the people expected to use it every day.
Frustration on the ground
Executives “automatically assume AI is going to be the savior,” said Steve McGarvey, a user experience designer, speaking to the Wall Street Journal.
McGarvey said large language models often slow down his work on accessibility tools for visually impaired users. “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.
Workers who keep their jobs after AI-driven restructuring often say they are forced to adopt experimental tools that do not fit their roles, with little room to push back.
Executive enthusiasm
AI evangelism has become common at the top of major companies. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has told staff they would be “insane” not to use AI for “every task” possible, according to reports.
Leaders at Microsoft and Google have also publicly said a significant portion of their code is now written with AI assistance, reinforcing the message that adoption is not optional.
Productivity doubts
The Section survey found that about two thirds of non-managers feel anxious or overwhelmed by AI, compared with less than half of managers. Nearly 75 percent of executives said they were excited by the technology.
Research has yet to confirm AI as a productivity breakthrough. A widely cited MIT study found 95 percent of companies adopting AI saw no meaningful revenue growth. Other studies suggest AI tools often fail at common office tasks or even slow down programmers.
As one worker put it, the real disconnect may be that AI aligns more closely with executive work than with the jobs of those expected to rely on it most.
Sources: Wall Street Journal, Section, MIT
