In February and March 2024, we ran three AI-focused polls, asking people how often they were using AI for work, what they were using it for and what their organization’s AI deployment strategy was. In total, over 5,800 people responded to the polls, and their answers shine a light on how thousands of individuals around the world are incorporating AI into their daily routines.
AI Poll: 68% Use artificial intelligence at work, nearly half for productivity
Artificial intelligence has captured our collective corporate consciousness like few technologies have since the invention of the microprocessor or the rise of the Internet. AI has the potential to transform every aspect of how we work, in both seen and unseen ways. To find out how process experts, business professionals and others are using artificial intelligence, Celonis reached out to our 200K+ LinkedIn followers.
How often are you using AI at work?
According to a Pew Research Center survey of US adults during July 2023, only 16% of those who had heard of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and were employed said they had used it for work. The percentages were higher for younger workers and those with some college or who have a college degree, but not significantly so.
Our followers reported significantly higher AI usage.
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Just over two thirds (68% to be exact) of the more than 4,000 respondents who answered the poll said they were using AI either extensively (28%) or occasionally (40%) at work. Only 17% said they rarely used AI, and an even fewer (15%) said they had not yet used it at work.
Our poll results track more closely with the findings from McKinsey’s 2023 global annual survey on the state of AI. In their survey of more than 1,600 business people from around the world and across industries, 79% said they had at least some exposure to generative AI (GenAI), either for work or outside of work, and 22% said they regularly used it in their own work.
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What’s your primary use for AI at work?
By far, the most popular use for AI at work was productivity, with nearly half of respondents (48%) marking it as their top pick. Content generation (26%) and data analysis (23%) were second and third.
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These results aren’t surprising given the countless anecdotal stories and even recent research about AI’s ability to boost worker productivity.
During a GenAI panel discussion at Celosphere 2023, Florian Tué, Head of Procurement Transformation at Carrefour, highlighted the productivity gains the technology has delivered for both his company and for him personally.
“I use it for my daily tasks because it's a huge gain of productivity for doing the minutes of meetings,” said Tué.
On the corporate front, the French multinational retailer is running a GenAI proof of concept project using ChatGPT to compare procurement quotes.
“We realized comparing three quotes would take around 30 minutes for a buyer to do it manually,” he said. “If we do it with ChatGPT and the POC that we've been running, it takes only 10 minutes. So the 20 minutes productivity gain is huge for our organization, and that's why we'll be pushing it so much.”
Researchers from MIT and Stanford found similar productivity gains when they studied over 5,100 customer support agents at a Fortune 500 software company. Between November 2020 and February 2021, agents were given access to a GenAI-based conversational assistant on a rolling basis. During support chats, the assistant provided real-time response recommendations and links to internal support resources.
In their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper titled, Generative AI at Work, the researchers detailed their findings. Agents who used the GenAI assistant were 14% more productive on average, measured by the number of issues resolved per hour. The researchers also discovered that using the AI assistant improved customer sentiment and increased employee retention.
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What’s your strategy for deploying AI?
Given the productivity gains AI can deliver, it should come as no surprise that a majority of respondents to our poll (66%) said their company’s strategy for deploying AI was either aggressive (20%) or balanced (44%). Only 35% of respondents said their organizations were taking a cautious approach.
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These results echo the findings of several recent AI studies.
An August 2023 study by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) found that 69% of CEOs saw broad value for AI in their organizations and 50% were already integrating generative AI into their digital offerings.
A third of businesses who responded to McKinsey’s 2023 global annual survey on the state of AI said they regularly use generative AI tools in at least one function, and 40% intend to increase their AI investments.
A survey by MIT Technology Review Insights of C-level executives from 600 global organizations, found that 100% will increase their spending on modernizing data infrastructure and adopting AI over the next year. Additionally, 26% are already investing in generative AI and an additional 62% are experimenting with it.