As corporations everywhere shove AI down our throats and businesses wrestle with the conflict between rushing to integrate AI to not be left behind and having to pay for it without long-term ROI having justified rising costs, there’s another side to the coin that’s been revealed in an interesting new study just published by Deloitte. The GenAI Workforce Survey, which Deloitte claims is the largest study of workplace GenAI use conducted in a single country, tapped 25,000 workers across the UK to find out how they’re using generative artificial intelligence — that is to say, chatbots, image generators, and other prompt-based AI tools — at work.
There are several interesting items within this study. First, let’s talk about the overall numbers. Of the ~25,000 workers aged 18-70, 63 percent (16,749 respondents) reported using AI for work (again, reminder that we’re talking strictly about the generative variety), 34 percent said they don’t use it at all for work, and 3 percent (627 people) said they didn’t know if they’ve used it.
And then there’s this:
The survey suggests workers using GenAI are embracing the technology more quickly than many organisations are making tools available. Nearly a third (31%) of GenAI users say they use GenAI without their employer’s knowledge, also known as shadow AI, and bring their own GenAI tools to work, while almost a quarter (24%) of UK workers now use GenAI tools every day for work. Many GenAI users (65%) also report a lack of convincing leadership on how GenAI should be used in their organisation.
They don’t explain how they arrived at this figure but Deloitte estimates annual personal spend among UK workers is £958 million ($1.3 billion USD).
Surely every one of those 5,192 people bringing their own AI tools to work are practicing safe AIing and not plugging client PII or company secrets into ChatGPT, right?
Yeah, so, third item here:
“The story here isn’t that workers are using GenAI, it’s that they are using it despite limited training, patchy guidance and, in some cases, without their employer’s knowledge,” said Paul Lee, partner and head of industry insight at Deloitte UK. What could go wrong!
More here if you want to check out the whole thing. Deloitte says they’ll be doing this survey every 6 months so it’ll be interesting to see how these numbers evolve over time.
