I can’t quite believe that the bosses of ~60% of workers are forcing them to use it.
Ummm…except, they are. On top of the fact that AI is being implemented internally, all across most businesses…everything you do as a consumer, is also being integrated with AI. We are all literally “being forced to use it”. In most cases, you can’t even opt-out.
My company just implemented AI directly into our payroll system. Now, instead of looking up our information using the old UI interface, we have an app that’s basically just an AI chat bot that we have to ask for information. No more pages to look up…just, “how many vacation hours do I have left?”, or “show me my pay stubs for (enter date range here).”
Technically, this makes everyone at our company a part of the statistical group that’s “using AI more than ever before”, and none of us had a choice in the matter.
That’s a reasonable use of a chatbot, to my mind. Payroll systems have historically been Byzantine, so being able to ask a question and get an accurate response due to database tie-in can shed friction. That said, available vacation hours, at least historically, was often inaccurate because of data-processing time. HR or IT still needs to input correct information to spit out a correct result.
Except, consider that the user just browsed to the vacation page to find that information previously. One click. Easy peasy.
Now they must interact with it by typing commands, like they’re playing an old Infocom game: “ASK PAYROLL BOT FOR AVAILABLE VACATION HOURS.” And sometimes it’s hard for humans to know what to ask and how to ask it. It’s much more user-friendly to just have something to click.
I don’t know what payroll systems you’ve used, but viewing that info in all the ones I’ve experienced involved drilling down through multiple menus with useless indicator icons. Just navigating to the correct page took far more time than typing “show available vacation time.”
Ummm…except, they are. On top of the fact that AI is being implemented internally, all across most businesses…everything you do as a consumer, is also being integrated with AI. We are all literally “being forced to use it”. In most cases, you can’t even opt-out.
Some companies literally have AI minimum use quotas and will fire you if you don’t use genAI enough
My company just implemented AI directly into our payroll system. Now, instead of looking up our information using the old UI interface, we have an app that’s basically just an AI chat bot that we have to ask for information. No more pages to look up…just, “how many vacation hours do I have left?”, or “show me my pay stubs for (enter date range here).”
Technically, this makes everyone at our company a part of the statistical group that’s “using AI more than ever before”, and none of us had a choice in the matter.
That’s a reasonable use of a chatbot, to my mind. Payroll systems have historically been Byzantine, so being able to ask a question and get an accurate response due to database tie-in can shed friction. That said, available vacation hours, at least historically, was often inaccurate because of data-processing time. HR or IT still needs to input correct information to spit out a correct result.
Except, consider that the user just browsed to the vacation page to find that information previously. One click. Easy peasy.
Now they must interact with it by typing commands, like they’re playing an old Infocom game: “ASK PAYROLL BOT FOR AVAILABLE VACATION HOURS.” And sometimes it’s hard for humans to know what to ask and how to ask it. It’s much more user-friendly to just have something to click.
I don’t know what payroll systems you’ve used, but viewing that info in all the ones I’ve experienced involved drilling down through multiple menus with useless indicator icons. Just navigating to the correct page took far more time than typing “show available vacation time.”
Try to jailbreak it into giving you more time off.