The adoption of AI tools in the workplace is making employees more productive, but new research from freelance hiring firm Upwork suggests it might also be hurting their mental health.
Following a survey of 2,500 workers (including executives, full-time employees, and freelancers) across multiple countries, the research showed that the most devoted users of AI tools, including agents, are also 88% more likely to experience burnout and twice as likely to quit, compared to their colleagues who use the technology less frequently.
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The vast majority of freelancers (88%) who responded to the survey, in contrast, said their use of AI has positively impacted their careers, without the psychological downsides reported by their full-time, salaried counterparts.
Among all respondents, 90% said they’ve come to view AI more as a fellow coworker than merely a tool. Interpersonal workplace dynamics are shifting as a result, according to the report: for example, 85% of respondents said they’re more polite to AI than to their fellow human workers, while 67% report feeling a higher level of trust towards AI than towards their human coworkers.
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“These findings illustrate that workers achieving the greatest productivity with AI have lost a sense of psychological safety and team connection that is foundational to their work experience, fueling their burnout and intentions to leave their current employment,” Upwork noted in its report.
The new findings follow research from Harvard Business Review published in May, which found that the use of generative AI in the workplace can boost productivity while simultaneously reducing one’s sense of meaning at work. The report also comes at a time when business leaders are figuring out what role AI will play in their companies, and how it will affect the future of their workforces.
Promises vs. reality
Big tech firms like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and Amazon have been investing heavily in AI agents – automated systems that can formulate strategies, take action, and use a suite of digital tools on behalf of human users – while marketing them to businesses as tools for boosting workplace productivity and efficiency.
Meanwhile, AI chatbots have grown more sophisticated, spurring many people to turn to them as a source of companionship and emotional support. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that AI companions could help to mitigate our society’s rampant loneliness – a very real issue which, ironically, the social media technology he helped to pioneer has played an outsized role in causing.
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Out of fear of being left behind, business leaders have begun to incorporate agents and AI tools throughout their organizations. One recent study from Stanford University found that many workers have already begun using agents in their day-to-day work, but only for simple and routine tasks.
The central promise from the big tech companies pushing AI into the workplace has been that the technology will take over the drudgework, freeing workers to focus on more fulfilling pursuits, including building deeper and more rewarding relationships with their fellow humans.
The new Upwork report, however, shows the opposite trend taking place: at least among full-time workers, a more pronounced reliance upon AI seems to correlate with a more socially isolated work experience.
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Freelancers, according to the report, offer a blueprint for healthy and sustainable human-AI interaction: “While [full-time employees] are developing a broad range of social relationships with AI, freelancers primarily use AI as a learning partner,” the authors wrote. This conclusion should be taken with a hearty grain of salt, however, in light of the fact that Upwork has a clear incentive to encourage businesses to hire more freelancers (ideally from its platform), and since other research has shown that freelancers tend to be lonelier than full-time employees.
The results of the survey underscore the fact that human well-being in the workplace depends on far more than just productivity. “The tools, tech and even who and what we define as a teammate are constantly evolving and expanding in the age of AI,” Upwork wrote in its report. “But the heart of work remains connection.”
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Source: Robotics - zdnet.com
