AI-pushing Adobe says AI-shy office workers will love AI if it saves them time

Adobe recently surveyed more than 1,000 employed Americans about their view of AI, and found that they could overcome their concerns about losing their jobs to AI if it saved them a substantial amount of time.

The subscription software seller, as it happens, has a horse in this race: Acrobat AI Assistant. Adobe decided to look at what's holding people back from embracing the generative AI service it's selling for $5/month, on top of any other subscription fees.

The problem appears to be document processing and management - office work - which Adobe in its own self-interested way insists is unduly tiresome to the white collar set. Presumably, all that taxing paperwork is taking time away from Minesweeper.

For those not versed on all the uses of Acrobat AI Assistant, it provides: document summarization; insight extraction (also summarization); generating ideas (to be summarized by AI because no one wants to read them); and asking questions about documents no one's keen to read (aka, summarization).

"According to the survey, 71 percent of employees reported feeling burnt out or overwhelmed when tasked with processing and comprehending information in documents, such as reading lengthy proposals, at work," the biz reported. "This stark reality highlights the urgent need for innovative solutions that can streamline document management and simplify our workflows, such as using AI."

Hiring more employees to balance the workload created by all this marvelous technology is always an option, but we digress.

The survey found that while 25 percent of professionals have some concern about the impact of AI on their industry - as in, it might leave them unemployed - a whopping 80 percent said they'd "embrace AI technology if it could save them ten or more hours per week."

Adobe suggests that generative AI in Acrobat would free up 10 hours spend on reading and writing drudgery.

But any time saved by AI would be filled with other work, so the net burnout and stress levels would remain the same. Either that, a quarter of the staff could be let go - which might come as some surprise to the 75 percent who voiced no concern about AI's impact on their industry.

To hear Adobe tell it, literacy-related activities - editing, summarizing, reading, and writing documents - take up an average of 24 hours and 54 minutes per week. With Acrobat AI Assistant, that time commitment could be trimmed to 2 hours and 18 minutes per week - "potentially leading to savings of up to $35,000 annually per employee."

This rosy projection comes with some methodological caveats. It's based on self-reported data, meaning there may be a gap between the task duration people report and how they actually perform. And from this data, Adobe then projected savings based on Bureau of Labor Statistics salary data.

The purported financial benefits would therefore only be realized if organizations had fewer employees on their respective payrolls, if employees or contractors worked fewer hours, or if workers became more productive.

Productivity gains for AI projected by parties without a vested interest look comparatively modest. Consultancy McKinsey last year suggested, "Generative AI could enable labor productivity growth of 0.1 to 0.6 percent annually through 2040, depending on the rate of technology adoption and redeployment of worker time into other activities."

Daron Acemoglu, professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expects that AI will boost GDP growth by only 0.93 percent to 1.16 percent over the next decade.

When we looked at the issue in July, just over 5 percent of US businesses were using AI on a regular basis, and calculating the return on investment for AI initiatives was not always feasible.

A recent study of bloggers found that they produced more blog content with ChatGPT - though at the risk of becoming less popular with some readers.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) conducted its own AI study between January 15 and February 16 this year, with the help of AWS Professional Services, and concluded that generative AI leads to people working more hours, rather than fewer.

"In the final assessment, ASIC assessors generally agreed that AI outputs could potentially create more work if used (in current state), due to the need to fact check outputs, or because the original source material actually presented information better," read the report [PDF], as noted by Crikey. "The assessments showed that one of the most significant issues with the model was its limited ability to pick up the nuance or context required to analyze submissions."

The Register asked Adobe whether survey respondents were asked if the accuracy of its AI Assistant mattered, or whether error-free output was assumed? We've not heard back. ®