Bosses Are Trying to Learn Exactly What AI Can Do

[00:00:01] Welcome to Tech News Briefing, it's Wednesday, June 26th. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. Generative artificial intelligence tools are changing work. CEOs, middle managers, junior employees, freelancers, everyone seems to be feeling it.

[00:00:20] Now there is data to support what many have been saying about AI's impact on work. Today we'll explain how two groups in particular, executives and freelancers are experiencing the change. We're starting with freelancers who represent an increasing proportion of the workforce.

[00:00:40] One study by Upwork found 38% of Americans did some kind of freelance work in 2022. For those jobs it's sometimes the case that the bulk of what a person is paid to do is precisely the tasks that can be automated, though some freelancers have benefited from AI's rapid rise.

[00:00:59] Here to tell us more about the winners and losers in the freelance space is our tech columnist Christopher Menz. So Christopher, a lot of people have shared stories saying a company chose to use AI instead of maybe hiring them to do copywriting or coding.

[00:01:14] What numbers do we have now to back up these claims? So researchers all over the world, China in the US and the UK studied freelance job boards like Upwork, Fiverr, their Chinese equivalents. And this gives you this really large data set. It's tens of thousands of job postings.

[00:01:35] There have been now at least a half dozen studies on this one of which showed that postings on job boards where freelancers look for jobs drop by 21% after the debut of chat GPT in categories where of course AI can take folks jobs and stand in for them.

[00:01:55] And that's a big deal because other research suggests that around 40% of Americans did some type of freelance work in the past year. How big of an impact could this trend of replacing freelancers with AI have on the economy?

[00:02:09] It's unclear what the effect on the economy will be because there are winners and losers here. So I also spoke with freelancers who found that their business actually increased after the debut of chat GPT.

[00:02:22] And yet other freelancers told me that they were using AI to make themselves more productive, to take on more clients. So everything depends on how quickly freelancers adapt and the ones who can adapt, what kind of jobs they take in lieu of what they were doing before.

[00:02:40] Can you tell us specifically about some of these maybe quote winners and losers that you spoke to? Tell us first about some of the people who are struggling since AI has been adopted by more companies. I spoke with both a copywriter and a concept artist for films.

[00:02:56] And both of them saw their income just be decimated soon after the debut of in one case chat GPT, in the other case the image generator mid-journey which is getting used a lot in Hollywood to generate concept art.

[00:03:12] And this wasn't a small drop in income. The concept artist I talked to, he said that his income in 2023 was less than half what it typically is. And that was even worse than in 2020 when almost the whole film and TV industry shut down because of the pandemic.

[00:03:30] The copywriter I spoke with she saw her income almost completely dry up over a period of months soon after chat GPT came out. But it's not all bad news, right? There are freelancers who are benefiting from the AI shift, right?

[00:03:44] Some freelancers are benefiting from the AI shift. One I spoke with told me he saw clients come to him because the firms that they were working with were using AI to generate copy and the results just weren't good enough.

[00:03:59] When you're in sales, let's say you're doing content marketing or email blasts. If you are sending something to an expert who's supposed to make a really big purchasing decision and is written by AI, it's unlikely to really resonate with them.

[00:04:14] He described it as word salad in one case. So it's one thing if you're just writing some website copy for a local plumber, it's totally different if you're trying to convince somebody to make a six or seven figure purchase of a big piece of industrial equipment.

[00:04:27] So if you have those specialized skills, you might do better. That was our tech columnist Christopher Mims and a quick note news corp. The owner of the Wall Street Journal has a content licensing partnership with open AI, the maker of chat GPT.

[00:04:42] Coming up, it's not just workers. The people in charge are still trying to learn exactly what AI can do. We'll have more on that after the break.

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[00:05:33] Rarely has such a transformative new technology spread and evolved so quickly as generative AI, even before business leaders have grasped its basics. In a recent survey by Staffing Company Adeco and Oxford Economics of 2,000 C-suite executives, 61% said AI would be a quote game changer.

[00:05:55] Nearly the same share said they lacked confidence in their leadership team's AI skills or knowledge. That can mean that executives are talking a visionary game about AI's promise while at the same time trying to learn exactly what the tech can do for their businesses.

[00:06:11] Our reporter Ray Smith, who covers career and workplace issues is here to tell us more about this. Ray, how has the increased use of AI tools impacted the feeling that success isn't deserved, sometimes called imposter syndrome?

[00:06:25] Because there are so many unknowns with AI, whether it's security issues or what it's going to do for a business exactly or how exactly should we be applying it. And also the hallucinations factor, that the fact that there are still errors, it's not a perfect technology yet.

[00:06:42] So there's just a lot more uncertainty and that's what's leading to leaders feeling like they can't with certainty say this is how it's going to work or this is how it's going to be or this is what it's going to do.

[00:06:55] We talked with a couple of leaders and not just CEO types but team managers. And one of them, he talked about the fact that he had a conversation with his team members about AI technology.

[00:07:08] They were working on a project for a client and he basically had to tell them, look this is an ever-evolving technology. What I told you two weeks ago about how this will work might not apply in a couple of weeks.

[00:07:22] It's something that he had to sort of acknowledge that even what I'm saying to you today or two weeks ago might change. And that's one of the struggles leaders have to deal with.

[00:07:33] How do the pressures that AI puts on bosses compare to other tech advances, like the advent of the internet or social media? We pose that to several of the executives that we talked to.

[00:07:45] And what we're finding is a lot of people are saying that while those technologies were big, the difference is that they say that AI touches all parts of the business. It's not just one part or a couple of parts.

[00:07:59] It's a holistic sort of changing technology where as the CEO of Russell Reynolds put it to me, you can't just delegate it to the IT department.

[00:08:09] It requires everybody on board and this sort of deep collaboration between departments and the CEO even can't afford to just be a dilettante or a loupe about it. They really got to be just as involved.

[00:08:23] I'm not saying they have to know every in and out of how AI works, but they really do have to have a deeper understanding. So who is mostly bringing AI tools and ideas about how to use AI to work?

[00:08:34] According to Microsoft, this was a study of working adults and 79% of knowledge workers said they had started using AI in their job. And the vast majority of those reported bringing their own AI tools to work.

[00:08:47] And so all these employees are coming to work having either done their own research on AI or played around and experimented with it on their own.

[00:08:56] And they're coming to work with knowledge basically, and knowledge that maybe their CEO hasn't had time or the leader hasn't had time to do themselves.

[00:09:04] And so they're almost, some of them are being tapped to sort of get the leader up to speed or more to speed or even force the leader to pay more attention to AI.

[00:09:15] Right. What ways have bosses found to successfully deal with AI's transformative potential given imposter syndrome, the speed of change and all these other complications? Yeah, they're handling this in a couple of ways.

[00:09:28] So several of the, like the team managers and CEOs I talked to talked about, look, I don't know this much about it, but I know I have to know more about it. And so I'm going to do my research. I'm going to take online courses.

[00:09:40] I'm going to work with the engineers in my department who know far more than I do. They're basically on the learning train.

[00:09:46] And the other way they're dealing with this is although few want to admit this is they really are leaning on their coaches, leadership coaches, CEO coaches to give them guidance on how to navigate.

[00:09:58] The uncertainty and navigate also communicating with their teams when they don't fully have a grasp on AI's implications themselves. What kind of pressure are they facing from employees who maybe expect them to be setting the strategy here?

[00:10:13] The pressure can come from employees who are just noticing what the rivals, even rivals that may want to hire them are doing. And it's paying attention to what's going on and how it can be a competitive threat to their own company.

[00:10:28] I had one example where I talked with an executive coach who recalls like one CEO client she had, their team was pushing him to address like AI's implication for the company.

[00:10:41] And they were nervous. They were just seeing what was going on around them and they were hearing more about it. And for some reason their CEO just thought they were overblowing it or they were exaggerating that that AI was just hype.

[00:10:54] And this coach basically told the CEO, look you need to take a different tack. You need to ask them why they think AI is a threat and what they think the company should do about it. And the CEO took that advice.

[00:11:05] He held a series of one-on-one conversations with staffers and then some group discussions and ultimately turned into a working group which turned into a new product based on that feedback. That was our reporter, Ray Smith. And that's it for Tech News Briefing.

[00:11:20] Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Catherine Milsopp and Deputy Editor Scott Salloway. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.