Robots Are Coming To T?a?k?e? ? Make You Awesome At Your Job

The narrative to date has been that Generative AI (GenAI) was going to destroy jobs and replace human labor. This likely emerged from early press hype feeding into societal fears about AI (think Skynet or The Matrix) and from the extreme corporate cost-focus of the past two years, just as GenAI was emerging as a topic.

But this narrative is wrong.

Yes, there are some places where humans will be simply replaced by full automation using GenAI—call center agents is one obvious example. However, research by BCG shows that 80% of jobs will have only 20-30% of their activities replaced by GenAI. In these cases, you still need a human overseeing or actively collaborating with the bot.

Furthermore, in many organizations, while there are activities that many people perform that can be automated by GenAI (such as writing documents), there is no concentration of people doing that task that you can pool and therefore eliminate whole roles. Removing 10% of the tasks performed by 500 people doing very different jobs does not lead to being able to cut 50 jobs.

This narrative is not only wrong but harmful. Imagine you are a division head at a bank and you are told that GenAI is going to allow you to cut 20% of your staff. Immediately, resistance will arise, with arguments about why the GenAI bot cannot replicate what your people do. On an individual level, being told to use a tool that is supposed to make you more productive while knowing that job cuts are coming is not exactly conducive to adoption. We have seen this in practice: a tech company implemented an agent-assist chatbot for their customer service agents to improve productivity and then wondered why only 15% of the agents were adopting the tool.

Recently, BCG conducted a scientific study with Wharton, Harvard, and MIT on the impact of GenAI on knowledge workers. The study found that while GenAI improved productivity by 25%, it also improved the quality of the workers' output by 40%. This is significant.

Real-world evidence shows that GenAI can create far more value in the quality and speed of output than in human labor savings. For instance, an insurance company implemented a GenAI solution to support its underwriters by handling the time-consuming task of reading and distilling key information from hundreds of pages of documentation. This saved the underwriters so much time that they could write policies for requests they previously had to pass on due to lack of capacity. It also allowed them to issue quotes to customers in hours instead of days or weeks, resulting in a significantly higher win rate. In the end, although the solution increased the underwriters' productivity, the company did not reduce the number of underwriters but rather grew their top line.

We need to rethink what we want to accomplish with Generative AI. This technology can create step-change improvements in performance for human employees, resulting in significantly faster output, higher accuracy, more rapid innovation and iteration of ideas, better customer experiences, and better employee experiences by eliminating tedious tasks. Yes, these improvements will lead to better productivity, which will translate to labor savings. However, in many cases, companies might choose to reinvest these savings into higher-growth, higher-ROI activities. Just as jobs have increased after every previous technological innovation, we believe the same will happen this time as well.

The industry has it all wrong—the robots are not coming for your job. They are coming to make you awesome at your job.