Gen AI and productivity: Are its gains real or just an illusion?
Every day, we hear about how Gen AI tools like Microsoft Copilot are boosting productivity by helping employees save a few hours each week. That’s great, but here’s the real question: What are we doing with that time?
As we know, motion isn’t always progress, and being busy isn’t the same as being productive.
Once again, we are focused too much on the role of a new technology to help us boost productivity while ignoring the cultural and systemic inefficiencies that cost us far more. Put in a different way: if we don’t fix how we work, any hours saved by tech will just be eaten up by more emails, more meetings and more busyness that leads nowhere.
Are we just busy being busy?
During and after the pandemic, many of us have become stuck in endless meetings, feverishly replying to emails in between. This gives an illusion of productivity, but are we really getting anything done? Unfortunately, the numbers seem to indicate otherwise:
- According to Harvard Business Review, executives spend nearly 23 hours per week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.
- A Deloitte study found that employees spend 250% more time in meetings compared to pre-pandemic levels.
- The London School of Economics estimates that 35% of meetings are unproductive, costing businesses $259 billion annually in the U.S. and £50 billion in the UK.
Let’s not forget "meeting FOMO" — attending meetings even when we have nothing to contribute. What once aimed to promote inclusivity and engagement is now costing organizations billions while leaving employees demotivated and burned out. The key point here is even if you apply Gen AI to increase individual productivity, unless you tackle these inefficiencies head-on, the saved hours will just be funneled into more busyness.
We focus too much on how Gen AI helps boost productivity, while ignoring the cultural and systemic inefficiencies that cost far more. If we don’t fix how we work, any hours saved by tech will just be eaten up by more busyness.
What can we learn from X?
Consider Elon Musk’s decision to cut more than 50% of the workforce at X (formerly Twitter). At the time, many predicted the platform’s collapse. Yet despite some glitches, that has not come to pass — so how much of what we do is truly essential and productive?
It is clearly a polarizing example, but it underscores one important fact for many large organizations: We can operate leaner and more effectively. We can accomplish more if we strip away the superficial busyness that often adds no value.
Going back to the basics
With so much economic burden tied to inefficiency, it’s time to give equal focus to how we work compared to how much we work. Here’s how to do it:
- Quantify the burden: Leverage Gen AI to evaluate the real value of meetings, emails and the plethora of communication and collaboration tools we have at our disposal. AI can summarize the conclusions of each meeting and identify action items in emails and messages. Using analytics, we can also identify the productive meetings and effective communication channels and eliminate those that aren’t serving a clear purpose.
- Take drastic measures: Introduce meeting-free days or meeting quotas for teams. One huge source of waste is meeting invites that are forwarded to non-essential attendees without approval from the organizer. Believe it or not, Copilot will help us streamline meetings by uninviting those who don’t actively contribute. It hasn’t been rolled out yet, but it’s coming!
- Empower competent managers: Hire and reward managers who understand the business, lead with purpose, and prioritize impact. They will help you build and sustain the right kind of culture – one built around outcomes and business impact.
- Revamp reward systems: It’s time to stop rewarding presence and start rewarding outcomes. Instead, we should be recognizing, celebrating and incentivizing impactful work to create and sustain an output-driven culture.
- Measure what matters: Shift from measuring individual productivity to evaluating business process-level outcomes, with CSAT (customer satisfaction) as the guiding metric. Gen AI can help identify positive outcomes and customer sentiment to quantify and track the impact that employees are making.
Final thoughts
I hope you don’t conclude from this article that Gen AI is making us all less effective by creating more busy work. Quite the contrary — Gen AI is transformational, but it’s just a tool. It is great at automating repetitive tasks, analyzing inefficiencies and enabling asynchronous collaboration. But like any tool, it can be misused or put to the wrong purposes.
My main point is that without making certain cultural shifts, we risk falling into the "zero-sum game" trap. Gen AI is a powerful productivity tool, but its gains can easily be nullified by outdated, entrenched work habits.
Posted on: January 9, 2025
Adil Tahiri
Head of CTO and Client Advisory GroupMember, Atos Research Community
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