Is AI making us lazy? | IT PRO

"By automating monotonous tasks like 'answer that email', 'key in that data' and 'find that piece of information', employees can spend their time on delivering great customer service, learning new skills, increasing business development and pursuing passion projects. Not only will this lead to a better and more profitable business but a happy workforce freed from process pain."

This is a viewpoint shared by Rachel Roumeliotis, vice president of Data and AI at O'Reilly, an online learning platform focussing on digital skills, who tells IT Pro that AI will only make us lazy if businesses use it in a lazy way. She says that if the technology is used correctly, it should allow people to be more creative and use their time doing tasks that can make a palpable difference to the business.

"For example, AI can be used to take on the burden of repetitive, administrative tasks, such as reporting. This is work which is often necessary, but which can take a long time and is more of a tick-box exercise than anything else," she says. "The onus, however, is then on businesses to encourage and enable their employees to replace that work with something more engaging and strategic.

"In some instances, this will be easy for businesses. Those hours spent on administrative tasks can be replaced by brainstorms or extra hours of content production. For others, it might require some restructuring of the business. Either way, training should be at the very heart of it. The time saved on performing admin tasks can instead be used by employees to learn new skills and impact the business in a new, innovative way.

"AI shouldn't be making us lazier, it should be enabling greater creativity and a greater sense of fulfilment within work."

Dr Lindsey Zuloaga, chief data scientist at HireVue, also believes that the benefits of utilising AI in the workplace far outweigh the potential downsides – particularly as a result of the COVID pandemic, which has caused workers to suffer from increased workloads and depleted resources over the past 12 months.

"In hiring, for example, recruiters are able to spend less time on scheduling and more time on candidate engagement and personalised interactions, as well as streamlining communication between recruiters, hiring teams and candidates," she tells IT Pro.

"All of these elements facilitate a faster turnaround time for new hires. This is far from laziness, but a modern way of driving efficiency and focusing your staff's time on tasks that hold greater value."

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