OpenAI’s AI (artificial intelligence) products save workers about 40 to 60 minutes per day on work tasks, according to a survey by ChatGPT owner, amid continued skepticism about the economic benefits of AI.
Employees in industries such as data science, engineering and communications, as well as fields such as accounting, reported some of the biggest time savings from AI, according to a survey of 9,000 workers at 100 companies. Three-quarters of respondents said using AI at work had improved the speed or quality of their output.
Three years into the AI boom, questions remain about whether – and to what extent – the technology will actually increase productivity. In August, researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) concluded that the vast majority of organizations saw no return on investment in generative AI initiatives.
The following month, researchers at Harvard and Stanford Universities determined that using AI at work created “job work,” a term defined as “AI-generated content that passes for good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a task.”
The findings have fueled fears of a possible bubble, as tech companies rush to spend billions on technology whose profits are still uncertain. OpenAI and other industry-leading companies have published their own research and assessments to demonstrate the economic impact of AI.
Last week, rival Anthropic released a report estimating that its AI tool, Claude, reduced the time it took to complete certain job tasks by 80%, among other results. The findings are based on an analysis of 100,000 user conversations. These studies are not peer-reviewed.
“There are a lot of studies floating around saying this, that and the other,” said Brad Lightcap, director of operations at OpenAI. “They never match exactly what we see in practice.” According to him, OpenAI is seeing that “enterprise adoption is accelerating, basically as fast as it is among consumers, and in some cases even faster.”
OpenAI has more than a million companies paying for the use of its enterprise AI products. According to the report, 7 million positions, or employees, pay for ChatGPT for use in the workplace.
The company surveyed workers three to four weeks after they began using the tools on the job. Highly engaged users, who adopted the most advanced models and used a combination of tools, were the ones who gained the most value from using AI.
According to the report, some professionals have also started using AI to perform new types of tasks. For example, employees working in engineering, IT, and research, but outside of technical roles, saw a 36% increase in programming-related messages over the past six months.
“Three out of four people now say, ‘I can do things I couldn’t do before,'” said Ronnie Chatterji, chief economist at OpenAI. “This often goes unnoticed in discussions about AI and work.”
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