@cantankerous_cashew@lemmy.world
Thousands of CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity
2026-04-20 08:35 UTC
Replies (31)
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@SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 21:15
Just another excuse to fire more workers and grind the ones they have even more.
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@bold_atlas@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 19:07
Of course it didn't. They adopted AI for stock price jumps. Then do layoffs for a x2 bump! Line going up is God. Literally nothing else matters. Not profit, not employees, not products, customers. Enshitification all the way down.
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@FireWire400@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 18:22
It had no impact on employment? What's with the mass lay-offs at nearly every big software company recently, that just happened to coincide with their push for AI then?
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@Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 16:24
I kind of suspect that the best deployment of AI would actually be to replace CEOs. It can hardly make worse decisions, and it's a huge cost saving.
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@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-04-20 16:13
Ok, now literally kill them all for crimes against humanity. Beyond being evil, these fucking morons are too incompetent to be left in charge of anything.
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@DupaCycki@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 13:56
Same thousands of CEOs will continue implementing as much AI as possible, because it literally doesn't matter to them whether or not it impacts employment or productivity.
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@RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 18:02
Love its' impact on my frame rate. It's OG application is great.
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@northernlights@lemmy.today 2026-04-20 17:59
Uuh, correction, it has a negative impact on employment. Even Musk admitted it recently.
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@RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 14:14
No impact on employment? How so? Weren't there layoffs due to AI implementation, expected or actual? Or is the time and work-hours needed to correct and understand what AI is doing not realizing the expected savings? Also, AI/LLM in the popular over-invested sense is the Tesla FSD of corporate tools. A badly designed, over-promised system that doesn’t live up to the hype and far too often commits errors, some of which are lethal or have other serious consequences. IMO AI should be a tool used in parallel with humans, like research or medical diagnostics, able to see things we might miss or rapidly try new multi-step combinations we might not think of. Not as a human replacement.
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@tburkhol@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 10:18
I feel like the big mistake they continue to propagate is failing to distinguish among the uses of AI. A lot of hype seems to be the generative uses, where AI creates code, images, text, or whatever, or the agentic uses where it supposedly automates some process. Safe uses in that way should involve human review and approval, and if the human spends as much time reviewing as they would creating it in the first place, then there's a productivity loss. All the positive cases I've heard of use AI like a fancy search engine - look for specific issues in a large code base, look for internal consistency in large document or document sets. That form lets the human shift from reading hundreds or thousands of pages to reading whatever snippets the AI returns. Even if that's a lot of false positives, it's still a big savings over full review. And as long as the AI's false-negative rate is better than the human, it's a net improvement in review. And, of course, there's the possibility that AI facilitated review allows companies to do review of documents that they would otherwise have ignored as intractable, which would also show up as reduced productivity.
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@stickyprimer@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 16:23
I’m a little confused by the opening paragraphs. So the advent of computers was hailed as a great productivity booster, but in the beginning, productivity actually went _down._ Is the article seriously contending that computers have not improved productivity? So there were grandiose expectations of huge boosts that would arrive immediately - so what? That’s naive and dumb. But in the long run, computers found their applications and people figured out how to put them to productive use. The world is unrecognizable today as a result. So what’s the implication for AI? Thousands of CEOs admit that their hamfisted shoe-horning of AI into the workplace has done nothing? Big surprise. Are we just in the awkward adjustment phase, though?
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@theOneTrueSpoon@feddit.uk 2026-04-20 09:05
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@Einhornyordle@feddit.org 2026-04-20 09:15
No impact? Nothing? I mean, they shoud at least notice something, right? > A [study](https://www.nber.org/papers/w34836) published in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among 6,000 CEOs, chief financial officers, and other executives from firms who responded to various business outlook surveys in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia, the vast majority see little impact from AI on their operations. While about two-thirds of executives reported using AI, that usage amounted to **only about 1.5 hours per week**, and 25% of respondents reported not using AI in the workplace at all. Nearly 90% of firms said AI has had no impact on employment or productivity over the last three years, the research noted. Well duh, that explains everything. Me getting paid for taking a dump 1.5h a week hasn't had any impact on my productivity score either. My guess is those 1.5h were mostly used to ask questions you'd otherwise just look up yourself, which also doesn't change much in terms of productivity.
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@deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 2026-04-20 10:01
Thousands of CEO's just realized they're the prime candidate for replacement by an LLM.
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@NostraDavid@programming.dev 2026-04-20 14:12
> “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” If you only measure the workers, sure. What if you measure the _processes_ that have been automated by programmers? I've automated a semi-manual (first run this script, then that one, and then...) process. Would that process show up on their measurements? I bet it won't.
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@TallonMetroid@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 09:15
> However, firms’ expectations of AI’s workplace and economic impact remained substantial: ***Executives also forecast AI will increase productivity by 1.4% and increase output by 0.8% over the next three years.*** While firms expected a 0.7% cut to employment over this time period, individual employees surveyed saw a 0.5% increase in employment. But they'll continue to shove it down the wage-slaves' throats.
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@fodor@lemmy.zip 2026-04-20 09:25
I love how Fortune is presenting this as like maybe the CEOs had been deceptive. They are admitting it which means they pretended otherwise for a while and now they finally have to tell the truth... Except Fortune was selling the same line, right there together with the CEOs. Has Fortune apologized for its own part propping up this bubble, when everyone knew it was largely nonsense?
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@FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 2026-04-20 09:17
Before we gloat too much - and let's be honest, we all wanna - CEOs tend to be of a certain vintage. I remember how I could program the VCR and my parents decidedly could not. Old folks' opinions may be less relevant here. Bringing all these tools in is basically giving magic beans to cave people. How would they know how to use them effectively? All the while trying to figure out if they are indeed magic. This, sadly, could just be the anomaly before the numbers go up. This isn't proof positive that it's all horse shit just yet. It's just confirmation that the peddlers are overflowing with it.
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@Buffalox@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 10:36
So the bad job numbers have nothing to do with AI anyways? Hands up if you are surprised by this... Why am i not seeing any hands???
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@webp@mander.xyz 2026-04-20 09:02
🌷 Ai bro dislikes a reference to the tulip craze
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@chaosCruiser@futurology.today 2026-04-20 09:04
Looks like AI is finally diving into the trough of disillusionment.
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@jordanlund@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 09:26
Among CEOs? Probably true. Workers are being outsourced in droves though.
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@chaosCruiser@futurology.today 2026-04-20 16:34
Just like any other tool, you need to know how to use it, and you need to adjust your expectations accordingly. Many people don't seem to know what it's good for or what to realistically expect from it. The way I see it, many people seem to have inflated expectations, but apparently the CEOs in the article are gradually coming to terms with reality. Clearly a step in the right direction IMO.
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@NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 2026-04-20 10:59
>I'm using it every day To do what?
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@porcoesphino@mander.xyz 2026-04-20 14:21
> Any time I want to know if a linux command exists to manipulate data This is one of the reasons I'm very cautious of my genAI use. Most of the time I got to the stage where I thought "there should be a command / way to do this" and I asked an LLM it would tell me the intuitive interface that I expected existed. But when I tested it didn't exist, the answer had just been creative writing
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@chaosCruiser@futurology.today 2026-04-20 16:07
Lemmy is indeed a very special place. :D Anyone with a balanced view on AI automatically attracts downvotes from a specific crowd in here. The problem isn't that you explained what you use AI for. They couldn't care less. The problem is that you clearly don't hate AI with a burning passion. I can see that there's clearly some great potential to have fun with a crowd like this. Just haven't figured out a good method for it yet.
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@Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2026-04-22 07:13
they knew, they just wanted the excuse to record profits by laying off hordes of tech workers.
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@Suavevillain@lemmy.world 2026-04-21 02:07
If anything depending on what type of work you’re doing AI creates extra work. AI has been nothing but grifting.
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@HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2026-04-20 23:26
Stop me if you've seen me post this already a million times https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsE0BwQ3l8U&t=1492s
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@porcoesphino@mander.xyz 2026-04-22 00:54
Ahhh... what!? Its linux, its faster to man the command or to type it. Point is that it usefulness to bullshit ratio *for me* in that situation was far too low
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@porcoesphino@mander.xyz 2026-04-22 14:40
I have wanted to transform things I didn't know how but it seemed possible. I searched and didn't quickly come up with an answer. I asked an LLM, and it gave me a confident answer. I checked the man for the tool and the LLM had used creative writing to create the interface I expected should exist... but it did not exist. I don't know how you're swapping or merging these basic facts: 1. If you're told the binary and the flag, the validation of the LLMs output is fast (either with man or executing the command) 2. If you have a process you're searching for then the searching can be slow to find the combination of commands and flags (and that's why so many people, by the sounds of it yourself included, use LLMs) I do think a "linux tutor" is one of the better use cases for LLMs for beginners, since you can quickly validate when its recommended commands are incorrect (but you still can't quickly validate if its description of internals is misleading). I just think it falls apart as you start requiring more specialised things, or are at a situation where "this should exist" because the LLMs habitually make things up that sound reasonable to fill in the gaps in what the tools can do. That's not an issue for beginners / the basics especially if there are lots and lots of tutorials the LLMs are sourcing from (although, that opens ethical issues too)