AI appeared like a stranger newly arrived in town, fluent in many languages, full of bravado and promises, and throwing money around. The long term residents are still working out what she is really here for.
Google published a study in July drawn from about fifteen million interactions with its own models, and the numbers underneath the headlines are, for me, the interesting part. Workplace use spans two thirds of occupations, covering close to ninety per cent of American employment. Within any one job, AI is used for about a fifth of the tasks, although fewer than one in ten of those interactions automates a task outright. What people mostly bring to it is ideation, strategy, information retrieval and learning. Broad, then, but shallow. The stranger is everywhere, makes a lot of noise, but does not yet do very much.
Despite that, she is affecting how we work, because the tasks we are giving her are the ones through which we have historically learned judgement: Framing the problem, tak…