AI Poised for Major Impact While Chatbot Adoption Struggles

A new McKinsey report released last week shows how big AI could impact jobs.  Quoting Morning Brew.

After examining 2,100 tasks across 850 jobs around the globe, the report concluded that generative AI could add anywhere from $6.1 trillion to $7.9 trillion worth of value to the global economy. How? By giving businesses more use cases for AI and revving up productivity as we’ve never seen before, especially for workers in customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development fields.

The report expects generative AI to automate tasks that take up 60%–70% of people’s working hours. In an ideal world, this means more time for the fun parts of your job or four-day workweeks. But in this world, it could mean your future coworkers are large language models.

Let’s note a minor detail — Only 8% of customers used a chatbot during their most recent customer service experience, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. Of those, just 25% said they would use that chatbot again in the future.   In the data,  Chatbots Resolve 58% of Returns and Cancellations but Only 17% of Billing Disputes.

AI and chatbots are not necessarily the same thing, so let’s be careful with the analysis.    The distinction I make here is that the first set of data talks about how AI will augment workers.  The chatbot notes that direct customer-to-bot experiences are weaker than one might hope.    The insight for me is delivering on employee augmentation over replacement.