Dive Brief:
- Employees have more access to AI-powered tools at work than ever, but they say they lack the skills or support to effectively use these tools, according to a Coda survey of 1,000 adults published Tuesday.
- More than half of employees say their employer has provided access to AI-powered tools, the survey found. However, those employees had to figure out how to use the tools by themselves without guidance. Only 1 in 5 employees are confident in their ability to write meaningful prompts.
- “As early adopters of AI, we have grand visions of escalating our work output. There’s no shortage of media outlets and multimessage Twitter posts that have convinced the masses that AI makes digital work a breeze,” said Bill French, founder and chief analytics officer of analytics platform Stream It, in the report. “Reality check: it doesn’t”
Dive Insight:
As with any new technology, there’s a learning curve with generative AI tools. Enterprises and employees were drawn to the user-friendly, publicly available tools, like ChatGPT and Claude, but there’s a difference between asking a model a question for fun and inputting prompts to assist workflows.
A good prompt can unlock efficiencies and push employees to think about problems differently or more creatively, but a bad prompt can slow down employees and cost businesses money.
Each prompt comes with a cost, and for large enterprises looking to scale generative AI tools across departments, those costs can add up.
PwC is rolling out a generative AI tool to its entire U.S. firm. Throughout the implementation, the company is training workers on how to be better prompters in order to keep costs down and speed up workflows.
Other companies are taking similar approaches to upskilling workforces as well as implementing guides for proper and safe use, proven prompt databases and ways to highlight key use cases.
JLL has rolled out its internal generative AI tool, JLL GPT, to internal employees as well. The commercial real estate company has put a focus on giving employees demos and instructions to better understand use cases and inspire them to create more, Yao Morin, JLLT CTO, told CIO Dive earlier this month.
