The new global study, in partnership with The Upwork Research Institute, interviewed 2,500 global C-suite executives, full-time employees and freelancers. Results show that the optimistic expectations about AI’s impact are not aligning with the reality faced by many employees. The study identifies a disconnect between the high expectations of managers and the actual experiences of employees using AI.

Despite 96% of C-suite executives expecting AI to boost productivity, the study reveals that, 77% of employees using AI say it has added to their workload and created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains. Not only is AI increasing the workloads of full-time employees, it’s hampering productivity and contributing to employee burnout.

  • @Hackworth
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    1 month ago

    What were they trying to accomplish?

    • FartsWithAnAccent
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      371 month ago

      Looking like they were doing something with AI, no joke.

      One example was “Freddy”, an AI for a ticketing system called Freshdesk: It would try to suggest other tickets it thought were related or helpful but they were, not one fucking time, related or helpful.

      • @Hackworth
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        161 month ago

        Ahh, those things - I’ve seen half a dozen platforms implement some version of that, and they’re always garbage. It’s such a weird choice, too, since we already have semi-useful recommendation systems that run on traditional algorithms.

      • @[email protected]
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        81 month ago

        That’s pretty funny since manually searching some keywords can usually provide helpful data. Should be pretty straight-forward to automate even without LLM.

        • FartsWithAnAccent
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          61 month ago

          Yep, we already wrote out all the documentation for everything too so it’s doubly useless lol. It sucked at pulling relevant KB articles too even though there are fields for everything. A written script for it would have been trivial to make if they wanted to make something helpful, but they really just wanted to get on that AI hype train regardless of usefulness.

        • @Static_Rocket
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          11 month ago

          TFIDF and some light rules should work well and be significantly faster.

      • Dave.
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        1 month ago

        As an Australian I find the name Freddy quite apt then.

        There is an old saying in Aus that runs along the lines of, “even Blind Freddy could see that…”, indicating that the solution is so obvious that even a blind person could see it.

        Having your Freddy be Blind Freddy makes its useless answers completely expected. Maybe that was the devs internal name for it and it escaped to marketing haha.

        • FartsWithAnAccent
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          1 month ago

          I actually ended up becoming blind to Freddy because of how profoundly useless it was: Permanently blocked the webpage elements that showed it from my browser lol. I think Fresh since gave up.

          Don’t get me wrong, the rest of the service is actually pretty great and I’d recommend Fresh to anyone in search of a decent ticketing system. Freddy sucks though.

      • @rottingleaf
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        11 month ago

        It’s bloody amazing, here I am, having all my childhood read about 20/80, critical points, Guderian’s heavy points, Tao Te Ching, Sun Zu, all that stuff about key decisions made with human mind being of absolutely overriding importance over what tools can do.

        These morons are sticking “AI”'s exactly where a human mind is superior over anything else at any realistic scale and, of course, could have (were it applied instead of human butt) identified the task at hand which has nothing to do with what “AI”'s can do.

        I mean, half of humanity’s philosophy is about garbage thinking being of negative worth, and non-garbage thinking being precious. In any task. These people are desperately trying to produce garbage thinking with computers as if there weren’t enough of that already.