We're Thinking About AI Adoption Completely Wrong

0:01Today on the AI Daily Brief, we're looking at a fascinating new study that shows that knowledge workers are bringing AI to work whether their bosses want them to or not. Before that in our headline section, why Apple's iPad ad controversy is actually about AI anxiety. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast that video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the discussion, check out the Discord link in the show notes. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headline edition. All the AI headline news you need in around five minutes. Today, my friends, is a very slow news day in the world of AI.

0:34I mean, crawling relative to what we're used to. Cool thing about that is it gives me a chance to go a little bit more in depth on a story that I might not have had time to that I think is actually really important. But before I get into that, I also want to talk about why it's slow right now. Matt Wolf, AI YouTuber, podcast host, and entrepreneur had a great tweet summarizing exactly what's going on. TLDR, this is probably the calm before the storm. Matt writes, for anyone thinking that AI is slow right now, Keep in mind, over the next several weeks, we have Google I.O., a rumored OpenAI product event, Microsoft Build, Computex, Cisco Live, and Apple Worldwide Developer Conference.

1:09These are the events where the big announcements are made. Point being, if it feels slow, don't worry, it's not gonna for long. But because there's a little more space, I want to talk about this Apple ad that has caused so much controversy this week. If you haven't seen it, basically the goal of the ad is to show the new ultra-thin iPad as the recipient and the natural inheritor of all human creativity. The unfortunate choice they made about how to demonstrate that was they showed all of these different tools of creativity. Musical instruments, synthesizers, record players, books. Basically this world of analog creative devices all smashed and crushed down to nothing with the end result being of course the tiny little iPad.

1:47ad. People hated this ad. I mean, viscerally hated it. They talked about how angry Steve Jobs would have been if he saw this. They talked about how it broke Apple's legacy of actually being the computer company for creatives. But I think a big part of the reason that the ad struck such a nerve was not about Apple or creativity in general. It's a very specific AI anxiety. Alison Morrow from CNN captures this in her piece today, Welcome to the AI Dystopia No One asked for, courtesy of Silicon Valley. Basically, the gist of the post is that one of the central fears around AI, hold aside any far-flung fears of AI ex-risk and robots taking over from humans and all that sort of stuff, one of the much more current and present fears is the destruction of creative industries.

2:32It's AI replacing illustrators, AI replacing writers, AI replacing painters, AI replacing musicians. This is palpable in society right now. It's palpable in lawsuits right now. In fact, if I were a betting man, I'd bet that a bigger portion of people who have a negative feeling about AI have a negative feeling about AI because of those reasons, their concerns around how it impacts human creative industries and human creative pursuits, than fears of Terminator-style futures. Along comes this Apple ad that basically visualizes that exact point. It obliterates the entire legacy of human analog creativity and says, look, here's a tiny thin screen.

3:12The response was so significant that Apple actually issued an apology, which is not a normal thing that Apple does. Indeed, the New York Times writes, Apple doesn't make mistakes often and seldom apologizes. But on Thursday, its head of advertising said the company had aired in making a new iPad commercial that showed an industrial compressor flattening tools for art, music, and creativity. Tor Mirren, the company's vice president of marketing communications, said, Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it's incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world.

3:39Our goal is always to celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video and we're sorry. In addition to the apology, they pulled all paid media spend from the ad. It's no longer on TV. It's no longer being promoted on the internet. And honestly, for me, the number of people involved in making an ad like this is significantly more than you might think. The fact that none of them notice that this might cause this reaction shows a very particular tone deafness That is unfortunately exactly what Silicon Valley is being accused of when it comes to this next generation of AI and other technology.

4:12That's pretty glaring. Meanwhile, case in point, musical artist Sheryl Crow was also in the news today, somewhat randomly, demanding that lawmakers act now on AI. In a column for The Hollywood Reporter, she wrote, What I can say with certainty is that what we all share is humans all over the planet, and what connects us is the human experience made up of emotions that nothing programmed can ever experience. and it is what has documented our existence since the beginning of time in our hieroglyphics and our paintings and our storytelling and in our songs. Interestingly, Crow had said that she wasn't actually planning on writing another album, but it was specifically her fears of AI and seeing what had happened that prompted her to go in and start writing.

4:47Now, if you're listening to this show, there's a better chance than normal that you have a more nuanced sense of the relationship between the potential for AI and creativity than perhaps either the blithely it's all going to be great side or the terror-bound it's going to be terrible side. Once you've experienced creating something with AI, you know how inspiring and exciting it can be. However, that doesn't make these sort of fears illegitimate. So anyways, big miss for Apple this week. Although that wasn't the only place they were in the news, Bloomberg is also reporting that Apple is planning to power the development of its AI tools with in-house server chips starting as early as this year.

5:20We've been hearing rumors that the company has been designing its own high-end chips for its data centers, and it appears that that is happening sooner rather than later. Writes Bloomberg, Apple's plan to use its own chips and process AI tasks in the cloud was hatched about three years ago, but the company accelerated the timeline after the AI craze, fueled by OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, forced it to move more quickly. The first AI server chips will be the M2 Ultra, Bloomberg writes, which was launched last year as part of the Mac Pro and Mac Studio computers, though the company is already eyeing future versions based on the M4 chip.

5:49As we've said before, it's going to be a steady drip of leaks, I think, between here and WWDC. And if you think you are anticipating what Apple's going to say, It's nothing compared to how much the market wants to know what Apple's going to say. For now, though, that is going to do it for the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition. Up next, the main episode. As a listener of this show, I have a strong feeling you like to stay up to date on all things artificial intelligence, including its impact on the workforce, which is why I highly recommend checking out Managing the Future of Work, the chart-topping business podcast from Harvard Business School.

6:22HBS professors Bill Kerr and Joe Fuller talk to business leaders, technologists, and policymakers grappling with the forces like AI, globalization, and demographic shifts that are reshaping the nature of work. Recent guests include IBM CHRO, Nicol Lamoureux, on how Big Blue is adopting AI, Morningstar CEO, Kunal Kapoor, on how AI can raise the investment IQ, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Jared Spatero, on how the tech giant is experimenting its way from AI assistants to autonomous agents, and many other prominent movers in business and the workforce ecosystem. So don't miss out. Follow Managing the Future of Work on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now.

7:25And if you do decide to subscribe, use code podcast for 50 % off your first month. Again, that's besuper.ai. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. One of the big topics of conversation around artificial intelligence right now is if and how it is actually useful in the workplace. There has been this low-grade conversation constantly ever since the launch of ChatGPT that's basically had a sub-theme of, well, yeah, these things are cool, but are they actually useful? Oftentimes, the contra-argument for why they're not so useful and just hyped up has been low rates of adoption in a top-down enterprise kind of way.

8:02You'll often see statistics in the media around how CXOs are slow-walking a little bit their adoption of AI because they're not sure where the ROI is happening. Now, my argument has long been that all of these things, all of these studies, all of these surveys, all of these statements, are completely wrongheaded and totally miss the mark of how AI adoption is actually happening. I believe that AI is not being adopted in a top-down sort of way, where like the cloud, an IT manager makes a decision about a tool and then spreads it to everyone in the company. Instead, I believe it's being adopted bottoms up.

8:35Individual employees are experimenting with tools, often in their own time and certainly with their own email addresses, figuring out what works for them, and then slowly and sometimes sneakily bringing it into the office, and mostly not telling people for fear of being told that they're not allowed to use it anymore. What's more, I think that the impact of AI is not about entire categories of jobs just suddenly vanishing from the earth. Instead, I think it's all about small but significant wins day in, day out, where employees either save time or do better work in a way that is at once tiny, but in the aggregate huge.

9:06In other words, think about it like this. If you used to make YouTube thumbnails manually and it took you 35 minutes, and now you make them with AI and it takes you 5 minutes, Let's imagine that you do that daily. Well, that's 30 minutes a day. That's two and a half hours a week. That's 10 hours a month. That's 120 hours a year, which if you're thinking about an average 40 hour work week is three weeks of time that you just got back. And that's to say nothing of potential quality improvements. So I'm ranting, of course, but this is because this has seemed incredibly obvious to me when you actually interact with anyone who's using AI at work.

9:36It's everyone. And they're not getting caught up on questions of ROI. They're just figuring out how these tools are incredibly useful right now. And they don't want to give it up. This is an enterprise technology category that has consumer adoption dynamics. Once you have used AI to continue this example to make YouTube thumbnails, you are absolutely never going back to the way that you did it before. Well, now we have a study that has finally started to put some numbers around this thesis. It's a report from Microsoft and LinkedIn called the 2024 Work Trend Index. They titled it AI at Work is Here, Now Comes the Hard Part.

10:10Here is the big banner headline. The way that Microsoft sums it up, employees want AI at work and won't wait for companies to catch up. Specifically, 75 % of knowledge workers now use AI at work. As we'll get into in a minute, they report incredible value around it being time-saving, boosting their creativity, allowing them to focus on their most important work. Contrast that with the top-down, boss-led AI adoption. On the one hand, 79 % of leaders agree that AI adoption is critical to remain competitive, but 59 % of them worry about quantifying the productivity gains of AI, and 60 % of them say their company lacks a vision or plan to implement it.

10:48And so they're stuck and they don't do anything, or maybe they do just some small proof of concept. The resulting phenomenon is something that Microsoft and LinkedIn call BYOAI. Bring your own AI. In short, 78 % of AI users are bringing their own tools to work. That means they're not using some tool that the enterprise has set up for them, they're just using an individual tool that works for them. Knowledge workers, in other words, are voting with their feet and they're saying, we are not going to wait for you to catch up. We are going to use these tools right now. For employers, there are huge problems with this.

11:18Some of them are about the downside. There are real security issues when it comes to company data if it's being fed into commercial tools. However, I think that the biggest miss here is the miss on all the benefits that come as this distributed network of employees is actually figuring out what works. The vanguard kid in the marketing department could be sharing what she learned with all the other folks over in the accounting department, but instead all of that knowledge is remaining trapped, stuck in people's heads, not able to actually impact productivity more broadly. And it's not just that these employees are not really sharing this, it's that they're actively avoiding talking about it.

11:5252 % of people who are using AI at work are reluctant to admit using it for their most important tasks. 53 % of people who use AI at work worry that using it on important work tasks makes them look replaceable. In other words, we've created an entire generation of professional AI smugglers. It's really important to note that the people who use these technologies really, really report incredible benefits from them. 90 % of users say that AI helps them save time. 85 % say that it helps them focus on their most important work. 84 % say it helps them be more creative. And 83 % says it helps them enjoy their work more.

12:2983 % of these knowledge workers like their jobs more because they're using these AI tools. Compare that with other studies which find that 68 % of people, for example, say they struggle with the pace and volume of work. Nearly half, 46%, say they feel burned out. It is insane to me that a technology that is having such a big impact on those challenges isn't being screamed from the halls by every boss, manager, director, and CEO. The good news is I don't think that this is a state that's going to last long. In our experience at Superintelligent, a significant number of enterprise leaders are coming around to the idea that the right way to adopt AI is, in fact, bottoms-up, to empower their employees to experiment.

13:11Experiment safely, but experiment. Figure out what works and then share that with their colleagues. I think once we break through and normalize this just a little bit more, the floodgates are going to come open with incredible benefits to follow. Anyways, friends, slightly different type of AI daily brief today. As we discussed in the headline section, it's a slightly slow news day, I think because there is so much in the way of big events and announcements coming up in the next few weeks. But I think that this one is really important. I think that the study is shining light on something that doesn't get talked about enough, and I'm glad it's now out.

13:41For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Until next time, peace.

14:00Thank you.