- OpenAI reported that AI boosts workplace productivity and work quality across industries.
- IT and marketing workers saw the greatest benefits, including faster troubleshooting and execution.
- Skepticism remains as other studies question AI’s measurable impact and warn of “workslop.”
OpenAI says it’s boosting productivity.
On Monday, OpenAI published its first report on the state of enterprise AI, and based on the 9,000 surveyed workers across 100 companies, three-quarters said that AI has improved the speed and quality of their work.
Here are the survey results:
- 87% of IT workers said they can solve IT issues faster,
- 85% of marketing and product say they can execute campaigns faster,
- 75% of HR professionals said employee engagement improved,
- 73% of engineers report faster code delivery,
- Coding-related messages increased 36% for workers outside technical functions,
- 75% of users report being able to complete new tasks they previously could not perform.
The report comes a week after Anthropic published its own findings, which said its Claude assistant cut task-completion time by 80%, based on 100,000 user conversations.
Anthropic’s findings don’t appear to have been peer-reviewed, nor is OpenAI’s survey. OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comments on whether their reports are peer-reviewed.
Despite the reports, skepticism still swirls about whether the technology is actually making workers more productive. An August study by MIT found that most companies saw no measurable return on their investments in generative AI.
A paper published by Stanford and Harvard University in September said that many professionals are churning out “workslop,” referring to AI-generated content that looks polished but fails to move tasks forward. Fears that the billions of dollars companies have poured into AI will not yield an equal return have been driving investor concern about an AI bubble.
