Dive Brief:
- Employees may be wary about the future of artificial intelligence tool use at work, according to a Monday report from Dayforce. The majority of workers expressed their hope that their employers use the time saved by AI to improve their workflow and mitigate burnout. About a quarter said they expect that AI-saved time will improve work quality.
- However, 40% of respondents said they felt their employer would give them more to do if AI saved time on tasks at work.
- Moreover, 39% of respondents predicted that time saved at work would lead to either slower hiring or reduced head count. This last finding in particular is resonant given ongoing layoffs, potentially fueled by AI investments.
Dive Insight:
Workers have been expressing anxiety about AI at work as early as 2023. Generation Z workers were frank about their fears of AI replacing them. Earlier this year, survey-takers told Dexian explicitly that they were worried about AI-related job loss due to increasing automation.
The impact of AI-related layoffs comes up in Dayforce’s report: 60% of respondents said that understaffing has become normalized, and Dayforce researchers explained that “leaner workforces have less room for disruption,” highlighting that crucial knowledge is becoming concentrated among fewer people.
The report acknowledged the tenuous state of many workplaces: More than half of respondents said losing multiple key employees would cause “significant” or “severe” disruption.
The disruption also comes from the technology itself, Dayforce noted. Almost 9 in 10 respondents said they were concerned about AI’s impact on workforce development, and more than 6 in 10 respondents admitted they were losing the ability to perform certain tasks themselves due to AI reliance. “This points to a growing ‘experience debt,’ a future capability cost that accumulates when people lose opportunities to learn by doing,” Dayforce said in a press release.
What does this mean for HR? If not deployed carefully, AI could disrupt leadership pipelines. This is a phenomenon that researchers — and HR professionals specifically — have acknowledged before. Notably, 50% of respondents in the Dayforce survey said they hoped that employers use time saved by AI to invest more time in learning and development.