BCG: Employees are saving more than 5 hours each week with Gen AI

Businesses are embracing Gen AI more than ever – yet still, the technology is receiving mixed reviews about its effectiveness, safety, and usability. 

To better understand this dynamic, BCG surveyed more than 13,000 employees spanning executive suite leaders to frontline employees across 15 countries to compile a report, titled: AI at Work: Friends and Foe.

From this research, BCG found that the adoption of AI technology has increased significantly over the past year, particularly with frontline employees, who are seeing tangible benefits in speed and reduction in administrative tasks. 

In an exclusive conversation with Nick South, a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, UNLEASH takes a deep dive into understanding how BCG’s research sees AI slotting into the workplace, and how employees are responding to its presence. 

The adoption of AI across the globe

Gen AI is slowly but surely becoming more widely adopted in the workplace, with BCG finding that over two-fifths (43%) of respondents use the tool regularly at work. Of these respondents, over half (58%) felt that Gen AI is saving them 5 or more hours each week. 

In addition, the report found that the more workers use Gen AI tools, the more their confidence grows – with confidence in AI rising 16 percentage points to 42% over last year. 

However, the more people use Gen AI, the more conscious they are of the potential implications for their work and jobs.

This being said, South explains that workers in the Global South (Brazil, India, Nigeria, South Africa, and those in the Middle East) are consistently more bullish and less anxious about Gen AI than their counterparts from the Global North. For example, in India, 54% of respondents are confident using AI, compared with 34% in the US.

“The Global South has a higher proportion of regular users of Gen AI at work among its leaders, managers, and frontline employees than the Global North does,” he says.

Managers and frontline employees from the Global South were more likely than their peers in the Global North to have received Gen AI training in the past year. 

“In the time freed up by using Gen AI, Global South respondents were more likely to experiment with the tool, engage in professional development, and focus on the quality of their work.”

With this in mind, the all-important question comes into play: What can HR leaders do to make the implementation of Gen AI a more seamless process – for both employers and employees?

South explains: “The challenge for HR leaders is two-fold. First, to help their organizations understand the implications of Gen AI and take advantage of the opportunities; and second, to seize the very real opportunities to make the HR function itself more efficient and effective.”

Expanding on this, South explains that HR teams have opportunities to reshape the way things are done to help businesses be more productive at every stage of the employee lifecycle – from recruiting, to handling employee queries, to learning and development. 

Supporting this, he adds: “Increasingly, there are more examples of smart, practical applications of Gen AI in the HR function. 

At the overall organizational level, the HR leader’s role includes helping the C-suite understand the workforce and capability implications, leading the upskilling of the workforce to use Gen AI in their work, and supporting the change management required to drive the adoption of new tools. 

“Gen AI also has the potential to reduce the amount of ‘toil’ in day-to-day work and increase the amount of ‘joy’ – and HR leaders should be leading the charge in helping organizations use Gen AI to fundamentally reshape the future of work itself.”

To validate these points, the study outlines five key recommendations which organizations can implement as they continue their ongoing transformations built around Gen AI. 

These are; establishing a transformation-first mindset; managing all transformations; building training muscle at scale; emphasizing how Gen AI can increase value creation and employee joy; anticipating the evolution of roles, skills, operating model, data; and governance.

With this in mind – does your organization see AI as a friend or foe?