The feared scourge of artificial intelligence (AI) hasn’t hit workplaces — yet.
Despite AI’s heavily hyped promise of ROI and wide-scale productivity gains amid accelerated use within businesses, it hasn’t had a significant impact on jobs or wages, according to a study by economists from the University of Chicago and the University of Copenhagen who examined the labor market effects of Generative AI models like ChatGPT on 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark. The study focused on 11 occupations considered vulnerable to automation that included accountants, software developers, and customer-support reps.
The findings of “Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects” challenge “narratives of imminent labor market transformation due to Generative AI,” the paper’s authors said, pointing to modest productivity gains on average of just 2.8% time saved per worker, or a few hours in an average working month.
The study concluded, “AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation.” (Confidence intervals in their statistical analysis ruled out average effects larger than 1%.) Even when time was saved, the study found, only 3% to 7% of productivity gains translated into higher earnings for workers, raising questions about who benefits from efficiency.
Anders Humlum, one of the two economists who authored the study, said slight gains in productivity were probably because of the difficulty of applying AI directly to real-world tasks. He said workers are often expending considerable time on quality control, such as checking or debugging code produced by a chatbot.
While corporate investment significantly drove AI tool adoption, saving time for 64% to 90% of many users, actual benefits were less substantial than originally thought. In fact, AI chatbots reportedly created new job tasks for 8.4% of workers. Teachers, for example, now spend extra time trying to detect whether their students are using ChatGPT to cheat, Humlum said.
Still, AI’s short-term impact on jobs and wages isn’t likely to assuage grave concerns of American workers, most of whom are bracing for tumultuous change in the workplace as AI agents and GenAI gain traction. Less than one-fourth (23%) believe AI will have a positive impact on how they work, compared with 73% of AI experts, according to a Pew Center survey of 5,400 adults.
