A new survey shows that nearly 40% of work done by AI is either reworked or a complete misalignment with the task given to it. Only 14% of employees that participated in the survey, which was done by Hanover Research for the global HR and finance software provider Workday, said the technology has significantly improved their work.
While AI still saves time overall, editing its output often takes longer than expected.
“Employees are saving meaningful time with AI tools, but too often those gains are being absorbed by rework – fixing mistakes, rewriting content, and double-checking outputs from generic tools – leaving significant value on the table,” Workday said in a blog post published just last week.
Over 1,600 business leaders and 1,600 full-time employees from companies around the world with annual revenues of at least $100 million participated in the survey. The result shows how AI adoption at scale still comes with friction.
David Adubiina
Workday executive Aashna Kircher said that this will improve as the technology advances and workers receive better training. "We're seeing a need for organizations to better enable their people to evaluate the output and make the right decisions in terms of how it's used," Kircher, who is the Group General Manager, cHRO Products at Workday, said in an interview with Business Insider.
The survey results show that 66% of leaders cite skills training as a top priority. Yet most companies are more likely to invest in new AI tech than talent development.
“Most organizations agree AI gains should benefit employees – but today, reinvestment still skews elsewhere. Companies are more likely to put AI savings back into technology (39%) than into employee development (30%). And instead of using time saved to build skills, many simply increase workload (32%) – leaving employees to navigate AI on their own,” Workday says in the post.
The survey also shows that fewer than half of job descriptions have been updated to reflect AI-related work, which has translated to employees producing faster AI-assisted output while still meeting the same standards for accuracy, judgment, and risk.
From a global perspective, a survey of 2,000 CEOs found that only about a quarter of AI initiatives had delivered the returns leaders expected, with an MIT study reporting something similar, that 95% of organizations reported no measurable return on investment from AI.
Despite these challenges, some professionals say that they would still rely on AI for their work. Emilie Schario, a working professional that Business Insider spoke with that works remotely for Kilo Code in Columbus, Georgia, says AI has slowed down her work, but she isn’t giving up on AI.
If anything, she finds the pros to outweigh the cons, even though she spent nearly half as much time reviewing the work AI gives her than she did working on a version of the same work herself.
"I think where people get themselves in trouble is that they take that output of the AI agent, they don't review it closely, and they just kind of pass it on. At the end of the day, you are still responsible for your output, whether it was generated by an AI agent or not," she said.
David Adubiina
