It has long been said that if you want to keep friends and refrain from alienating people, it’s best not openly to discuss religion or politics in a general setting. And while that remains an especially viable truth of life in 2024, it is perhaps also worth adding one more topic to that list of no-goes: artificial intelligence (AI).
The invention and steadily growing widespread implementation of AI across numerous fields has led to a generational divide forming between workers of different age groups. In many ways, the advent of AI has taken the foundations of a fracture already present in many workplace settings, in which older employees were less well-versed or comfortably using explicitly digital means than their younger counterparts, and multiplied it tenfold. As AI spreads from one industry to the next like an all-consuming plague, it fundamentally changes how numerous job positions operate and the expectations of the average worker in those fields.
AI Tools are Becoming Increasingly Common in the Workplace
According to recent surveys, over 25% of workers now say that they rely on AI tools to perform some portion of their job. This showcases the kind of rapid adoption and integration that has taken place across numerous industries and the ways in which it has dramatically recontextualized workflows.
The Adaptavist Group, a digital transformation firm that works with over half the Fortune 500, performed further extensive surveys of this evolving market.
The 2024 Digital Etiquette Study surveyed 4,000 global knowledge workers and found:
“Nearly a quarter (23%) of knowledge workers already rely on AI assistants as their most used digital work tool, ahead of Slack (8%). Global knowledge workers were also over six times more likely to say ChatGPT is their most preferred work tool over Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude (3%), illustrating OpenAI’s early lead in this burgeoning tool category.“
The versatility of these AI assistants, which can be used for a variety of workplace tasks, is likely winning over knowledge workers who are struggling to come to grips with an increasingly bloated digital tool stack. Only 10% of global workers report streamlining their work tools over the last year, while 48% were now tasked with using more applications than twelve months ago.
As such, one can clearly see the drastic and steady incline in usage that AI has seen over the course of just this past year. As the technology becomes increasingly advanced, more industries have bought into the potential of its applications in their respective fields and actively implemented it into the day-to-day routines of their workers.
How Can AI Change the Way People Work?
Some wonder how it will all pan out, including Jon Mort of The Adaptavist Group. Will AI “be threaded through every single part of the products that we have, or are we going to have these distinct interactions with a tool that we might be treating almost like a person or collaborator?” asks Mort.
ChatGPT currently dominates the AI tool usage realm (97% vs 3% for Claude), likely due to first-mover advantage and brand recognition. ChatGPT is synonymous with AI in the same way that Google is synonymous with search engines; it’s simply the first thing the general public thinks of when they hear the term.
One of the tremendous upsides to this increased implementation of AI is how it combats tool overwhelm in the field. Tool overwhelm is a universal challenge across generations, and AI has the potential to offer consolidation opportunities, blending numerous workplace solutions into a single function and eliminating wasted time and extraneous manual labor.
Looking Towards the Future
Reverse mentoring has been proposed as a strategy to bridge generational divides in tech adoption and workplace collaboration. Younger employees are far more likely to be willing and capable of utilizing AI. In comparison, older employees, by and large, are much more set in their ways and less adept at adapting to such profound changes in their operations.
Looking toward the future, AI promises to only continue to expand, grow, and learn as it is implemented into increasingly diverse fields. In order to prosper in the workplace moving forward, workers will not only need to acquiesce to AI, but learn to work in tandem with it. AI is making work simpler, more straightforward, and precise, but workers of all ages must be properly trained and prepped to get the most rewards out of its immense potential.
