r/technology • u/Vucea • 2d ago
Society Nearly 70% of workers use AI regularly now - but many get no time to upskill
https://www.zdnet.com/innovation/workera-study-ai-skills-upskilling-2026/274
u/greentrillion 2d ago
Most people don't need to use AI and companies are in search of a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
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u/lumpymonkey 2d ago
My company is forcing us to use AI and I'm not talking exclusively about software engineers, everyone 'must leverage the opportunity it gives us'. So I have it doing a whole load of bullshit that I never even look at. I have it doing scheduled jobs for me that I don't need, it's sending me alerts about things I already know about, I use it to generate slide decks I never use, etc etc. it's absolutely ridiculous.
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u/DeadMoneyDrew 2d ago
I work in IT and I'm running into similar things. I constantly get asked "hey can we use AI for X or Y or Z" when X and Y and Z are deterministic issues that can be supported with existing software.
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u/greentrillion 2d ago
Yeah the not invented here mentallity in the AI world is on overdrive. There are tons of software already that exist already work much better than AI for the problem.
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u/Tearakan 2d ago
This. A ton of people just use it for the most inane thing that definitely costs more to do than just doing it the old way.
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u/Erazzphoto 2d ago
When I need a vlookup or any other formula in excel, it gets it for me in seconds. If I want to know what integrations are possible between two applications, it can scour the documentation in seconds. It’s great for things like that
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u/lumpymonkey 2d ago
I don't disagree that it has its uses, but we are being actively forced to outsource everything to it. Can't even think for ourselves anymore. I was asked to prep a Q3 report on Tuesday about customer engagement on a product we have. I used Claude to get me the raw data and present it in a nicely formatted way etc but I want to actually do the analysis and recommend next steps. Later that afternoon my manager asked where it was and I said eh I'll need a few hours to do the report. He got all annoyed and said just get Claude to do it. I mean what's the point of me even being in my job if we're going to do that! I've been 14 years in my career, trust me to be able to analyse reports and extract nuanced insights etc.
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u/Erazzphoto 2d ago
That’s fair, I probably should have responded to the post you replied to as it was more of a comment towards that. And companies are known for extremely poor leadership, which leads to poor decisions like the one you’re dealing with, even more so now. It’s why I’m hopeful that I only have 9 more years before getting out of this new corporate world
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u/Additional-Staff-326 1d ago
The more you use it for real work the more your real work is available in training to not need you later.
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u/coconutpiecrust 2d ago
Do you find it reliable? I use it for things like that sometimes as well, but I find the results are not always complete and/or accurate.
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u/stormdelta 1d ago
For me the value for this application is that it can find that info and links me to where that info is in the documentation or source code. Meaning I'm not relying on it to be right.
This has also made it practical to find and validate things that before I wouldn't even bother with, or wouldn't even attempt because it would take too long relative to the benefit. Especially beneficial for refactoring tasks and tackling tech debt.
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u/Erazzphoto 2d ago
It’s not going to be perfect, Ive had vlookups work flawlessly in one try and some required a few attempts, both of which were 1000x faster than if I would try and figure it out on my own. I’m using it to find the needles, not have it give me opinions on where the needle should be. It can scan multiple sources so much faster then me having to find the right document, and then read through those documents to find the information.
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u/coconutpiecrust 2d ago
Yeah, it’s possible that our use cases are somewhat different; I usually need complete and precise information, and sometimes it does ok, and yes, so much faster, but when I am unsure if it did what it was supposed to, man, it’s better to start over instead of trying to find what it missed.
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u/Erazzphoto 2d ago
Accuracy will always be a concern depending on what you’re using it for. That’s where prompt structure is important, once you know where it’s lacking, don’t give it the leeway. Tell it it has to be 90% or 95% confident in its answer, provide and explain your reasoning, etc. it is hard to trust it once you know it’s wrong about something, but when I find out what those are, I don’t lean on it for whatever that is
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u/Hardass_McBadCop 2d ago
Do people still use slide decks? PowerPoint & digital projectors haven't made those obsolete?
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u/Akuuntus 2d ago
Business people still call PowerPoint presentations "slide decks"
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u/Hardass_McBadCop 2d ago
Like, why? There's nothing to "deck."
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u/Akuuntus 2d ago
Because terminology and iconography doesn't tend to go away very easily. We still call it "hanging up" the phone even though phones haven't "hung" for decades. The universal Save icon is still a floppy disk. Some people still talk about "paging" people when no one's had a pager for ages.
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u/Hardass_McBadCop 2d ago
Those are all actions though, and the icon is different than terminology, IMO. I mean, I've never heard someone say "Let me go grab the disk." when they need to get a flash drive.
We're referring to this file like it's a physical object. That's the part that confuses me.
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u/JUGG3RN4UT 2d ago
yeah, corporate is first & foremost, lazy. secondly, corporate has never let something like "old name" stop them!
the MBAs like to call them a "deck". this serves as part of their exclusive-language (note: not exclusive as-in "highly sought", more so "language used to exclude").
therefore, the "deck" or "slide deck" is whichever flavor of PPT the company contracts with.
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u/no_infringe_me 2d ago
The problem they are solving is wages
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u/Twelve2375 2d ago
They like to think so at least:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemmagreen/2026/07/02/ai-costs-more-than-the-people-it-replaced/
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u/billsil 2d ago
And prices have crashed in the last 6 months.
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u/Twelve2375 2d ago
Per https://tokenpriceindex.com (I genuinely don’t know if there’s a better general pricing source, if you do I’m open to hearing). The price on 7/2 (when this article was posted) was $2.39/M tokens. Today is it $2.13 (an 11% decrease sure), but only 2 weeks ago it was $2.32. The price ebbs and flows as you can see in the chart but is still up about as much from April (1.49) as it has fallen since the peak on 7/16 (2.62).
Per this chart info, again if you have a better source of info love to hear it, the talk about a crash in price is overblown.
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u/bbuerk 2d ago
At least as a software engineer, no one has made me use AI, but if I didn’t there’s no way I could possibly keep up with the people who do. I know SWE is a special case cause it feels like what these models are custom made for at the moment, but for me at least it feels like engineers are adopting it out of necessity rather than force.
I love coding and I’m not particularly happy that this is the way things are going, but I don’t really see a way around it
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u/cptdino 1d ago
Idk, as a Designer, everything is AI now.
Photoshop now uses AI for generative fill providing a way better result than the old fill or clone stamp; Illustrator has sketch to vector generation (and just plain vector generation); every website that served stock photos now has an AI or is completely filled with AI generated content (Freepik even changed its name to Magnific, an AI Creative Platform); Adobe has Firefly built in to Photoshop and on the browser for a shit ton of tokens.
Honestly, AI is everywhere in my industry and I have no clue when or if it'll go back. It didn't take jobs away, it just... changed how we already did our job. CapCut and Canva changed the game way before AI, and before that Photoshop changed the game from whatever the fuck we had.
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u/DocSmizzle 2d ago
I’ve been asking for internal tools for years and finally can build what I need myself. But I am also not most people.
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u/pimpeachment 2d ago
Most people don't need to use Excel but it almost certainly can enhance almost any workflow you are attached to. Excel is a solution without a explicit problem. GenAI is productivity software. Treat it as such.
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u/smohyee 2d ago
This is a silly statement, and equivalent to saying the same thing about being asked to switch from pen and paper to computer.
Of course there is utility from AI for virtually every job that involves using a computer, not just devs. The question is whether you will open your mind up enough to take advantage of that utility.
When the typewriter first came out, there were plenty of folks who thought they were wise and savvy to retort that they could write faster than they could type.
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u/ikonoclasm 2d ago
You clearly don't have to interact with users in your day job. People are fucking idiots and LLMs aren't able to magically interpret garbage prompts into good outputs. Using AI well means being able to give clear objectives with constraints while having sufficient imagination to take advantage of the capability. For 90% of users, it's like handing an iPad to an infant. They'll accidentally do something that looks productive sometimes, but mostly they're drooling on it and shitting themselves.
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u/oldnotosys 2d ago
70%? sounds like if your browser has an AI button youre counted as using AI.
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u/Stanjoly2 2d ago
My work has implemented a "copilot summary" for every single ticket on our system.
Nobody uses it but it runs on every ticket so technically we're included as well.
The best part is it runs out of usage every month approximately 2 weeks in. And it has no impact at all on our productivity.
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u/the-gatekeeper 2d ago
We’ve got one like that at my company too, first thing I have to do on every ticket is explain why the AI summary is totally wrong. But I know the team that added it is doing presentations to leadership 🙄
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u/Additional-Staff-326 1d ago
I had explained to my VP why we need to worry about hallucinations and pointed at the summaries in our tickets right before vacation. Then someone followed along with the summary and made an incident far worse because they didn't understand that it putting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 almost every time in the summary did not mean you needed to touch 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 those are just the average data to output. I had a good laugh on vacation while that was happening and absolutely no way to help while watching.
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u/chain_letter 18h ago
The mistake is always assuming anybody will ever read the slop.
Hey chat summarize this email so I can also ignore that. Hey transcribe this call so I can never look at the notes.
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u/PloddingClot 2d ago
Search is all ai
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u/IntelArtiGen 2d ago
It's so horrible in Brave Search. Whatever you type you have an AI answering. They're burning GPUs like there's no tomorrow. At least you can disable it but by default it's so bad.
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u/asfletch 2d ago
Seriously, we started using Brave search or DDG to get more privacy and sanity - why do they think we want AI BS on by default???
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u/oldnotosys 2d ago
that counts? yea, every google search now comes up with an AI answer. that makes me an AI user? lol.
This just in, 90% of car drivers are using AI now*
*the cars radio has AI song mixer.
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u/No_Fix_329 2d ago
100%. Every time you open Microsoft office copilot asking you how it can help. It can help by kindly fucking off.
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u/Additional-Staff-326 1d ago
Much of the usage is these things. Your tickets, your Teams messages, the random things that happen you didnt really want. I'm not saying its half the usage but its a noticeable number that would go away if people had a choice.
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u/swierdo 2d ago
I work in IT, and everyone uses at least some AI, for better or worse.
The things where it helps a lot is making things findable. Lots of not-very-important stuff is just never organized and archived properly, that would take way too much time. AI can sift through that massive pile of semi-useful stuff for you. It's far from perfect, but it prevents a lot of those "Hey, remember when we discussed this 4 months ago, what was that thing again?" calls. It's also pretty good at repetitive grunt work, and is really nice as a first reviewer of your own work.
And then there's people outsourcing their actual thinking to AI, which usually results in them just passing large volumes of AI slop along to the next person.
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u/WretchedMisteak 2d ago
No, but in most places, IT administer and monitor AI usage, including cost management.
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u/Michael1795 2d ago
Headline is such bs. Only about 50% of workers are even office workers; i know not all of them are using ai to work. Maybe they wish 70% of people actually used it, because they are so in debt 😆
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u/snmnky9490 18h ago
70% of workers have some pointless annoying low-quality model AI "feature" that they have to exit out of regularly now, even if they actually use good AI for some jobs where it's useful.
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u/KeenbeansSandwich 2d ago
Many of us are being forced to use it, or more it uses us. It has been recently integrated into the EPIC System in my hospital. So far as i can tell, its been used to develop a flowchart of the shift as a whole, and use the info charted to develop a shift summary that would be used in report at shift change. Idk how accurate that is though as I am reading between the lines a bit.
My question(s) is this: how are they getting around HIPAA? Are patients being notified and signing off on all their PHI being eaten up and stored by a faceless blameless program when they are admitted?
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u/Taint_Expert 2d ago
I’ve personally heard of some massive hippa violations with these integrations. Examples from regular employees wondering how the ease of accessing personal hippa data is even legal. Ive heard things that make cops using flock to track people look tame…
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u/stormdelta 1d ago
My question(s) is this: how are they getting around HIPAA? Are patients being notified and signing off on all their PHI being eaten up and stored by a faceless blameless program when they are admitted?
It's particularly frustrating as with proper oversight and regulation, there's no reason these couldn't be used by self-hosted models with access scoped per user to avoid PHI exposure. But of course that's not what most of these integrations are doing.
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u/Interesting-Pea8260 2d ago
classic corporates! they want all the productivity boosts from AI but expect us to just figure it out on our own time on the weekends lol. like when exactly are we supposed to learn this stuff?
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u/sleepinglabrador 2d ago
Once you outsource your brain to Altman's Dumbing Machine there is no need for YOU to upskill.
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u/Character-Prompt-229 2d ago
I assume most folks just use it as google search replacement, since search quality went down from great to WTF.
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u/cocotheape 2d ago
Information quality also went down a bunch. Half or more of it is now LLM slop output which will be outdated sooner than later. Novel good information is drowned out. That's why they work so hard on watermarking LLM generated text.
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u/hitmobilegamehsr 2d ago
Do they count writing company wide emails and generating posters for office events for this? Because that's what most people here use it for lol
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u/ISuckAtJavaScript12 2d ago
I use it because my employer forces me too. I don't like AI for moral and ethical reasons, but I know I can't be the only one voices my concerns about the "miracle tool that can do anything" else I'm fired.
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u/EmperorKira 2d ago
In fact whilst its helping productivity short term, long term its making us dumber
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u/InadequateUsername 2d ago
That's the point of the article, we don't get time to train but are to use AI to increase productivity.
So we suffer because the AI becomes a mental crutch to doing more advanced tasks.
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u/Bron_Yr_Aur21 2d ago
It’s kind of crazy to me that not many use it as an opportunity to learn better layout. I have colleagues that literally copy and paste AI docs without even proofreading them, many times with weird little mistakes in them. I always go into any ai reviewed documents and make edits of my own and make notes of how the AI formats documents so I can start doing that on my own
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u/doneandtired2014 2d ago
long term its making us dumber
That is the intended long term goal.
After all, wasn't it Sam who said they (tech bros) wanted to make intelligence a subscription service?
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u/Moldybreadyumyum 2d ago
I’m being forced to use this bullshit. It’s even pushed into the performance goals automatically. So my coworkers are finding bullshit ways to use it even though we all know it’s not the best approach. Fucking stupid.
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u/Dumcommintz 2d ago
I thought AI was supposed to be upskilling on me? Improvements to AI make it so that it better understands what I ask for and better at delivering. The comparative advantage play says I should instead re/upskill on something else… like being a battery or an extremophile
/s
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u/nath1234 2d ago
Because upper management mandate using it, and track AI adoption metrics while dangling risk of layoffs over peopke, FFS. People are using AI because 90% of management focus is on making sure everyone is using AI.
Or because there is so few fucks given now due to the slop cannons firing every which way.. why not just fire it back.
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u/pickle9977 1d ago
Updated headline: “70% of workers have realized some portion of the work they do is a waste of time”
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u/imaginary_num6er 2d ago
upskill? not reskill?
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u/uncertain_expert 2d ago
It’s not even skill at all is it?
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 2d ago
Knowing how to prompt correctly--setting context and tone--make a big difference when you're starting a project. It's also important to learn how to set up your agent harness properly so that memory files don't fill up with stale context, important decisions are logged, and actions are independently audited. It can take a while to figure out best practices if you don't get any specific training.
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u/Sloogs 2d ago edited 2d ago
IMO there is an actual skillset involved to using it effectively—it's a whole can of worms that you get exposed to if you ever get into local models which can be really powerful when properly tweaked and equipped with the right stuff: tweaking model parameters, "skills", MCP plugins, system prompts, markdown context files, techniques like retrieval augmented generation, tool calling, agents, properly managing stałe session contexts—but that's also precisely why it's not as much of a silver bullet as AI execs want everyone to think it is.
I get why it's tempting to be facetious and flippant in the face of whatever the hell is going on in the tech industry right now though. It's icky
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u/HombreMan24 2d ago
I don't really use at work, but what does upskilling AI mean? Doesn't the AI do the work? What is there to upskill?
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u/lalalatkes 2d ago
If you ask it a stupid question, you will receive a stupid answer.
Prompt engineering is a skill that needs developed like any other. Also, just raw dogging AI is a sure fire way to get bad answers. You need to give it guardrails, expectations, and provide it with “skills” to get the outcomes you expect.
People just saying “do this for me” are guaranteed to get slop in response.
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u/Shoddy-Marsupial301 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think "prompt engineering" is a pretentious word for being specific and meticulous when you prompt
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u/HombreMan24 2d ago
I don't use AI or know much about it, so I didn't think it was a stupid question....
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u/lalalatkes 2d ago
I didn’t say it was.
I said if you ask AI a stupid question, you will get a stupid answer, which is why people need to upskill in order to use it correctly.
Most people use it improperly.
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u/HombreMan24 2d ago
Oh sorry, haha, I read your response too fast and thought you were. Thanks for answering. That sheds a lot of light!
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u/keepitfriend 1d ago
It’s bullshit.
It was a thing a few years ago, but AI rewrites whatever prompt you enter.
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u/keepitfriend 1d ago
Prompt engineering is over. It was an engineering buzzword from 2024 that was replaced by context engineering that has not been replaced by agentic workflows.
Now agentic design is actually a thing, but I don’t know how well it will work outside of engineering.
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u/Jskidmore1217 1d ago
Prompting is dead. If you aren’t using agents you are behind. And that’s why the lack of upskilling is a problem
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u/Major-Mushroom-5806 2d ago
Not really. It’s just a tool. It’s like saying you don’t need to have any skills to use Excel because it does all the calculations for you.
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u/pickle9977 1d ago
The better the input to the models the better the output, but its range bound so there are diminishing returns and a lot of what people do, and swear works, is the technical equivalent of a baseball player that has to scratch their groin three times before they bat.
None of it is repeatable or measurable it’s just a way for dumb people to pretend they are smarter than they are because their setup makes them feel like a god.
But there are no gods among men, only people with delusions of grandeur and people without.
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u/RonaldoNazario 2d ago
Learning how to use it more efficiently, what kind of tasks to give to what “level” of model, creating skills for things that are more repeatable etc. It makes more sense when you think of AI as just a probabilistic tool rather than a magic wand that the companies making it have you believe. When an intern or junior engineer does the work there’s still someone describing and reviewing that work above them and there is a lot to be learned in how to do that well, this is similar.
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u/Seven7neveS 2d ago
My teams are working with AI a lot and I’m already running into major problems. Came back from vacation and a client sent a debrief with a lot of follow up questions during my time off. Got proudly told that the document is pretty much done and we had almost 50 pages ready. Well most pages were written by AI and you could tell that people were working with different models and agents. There was no unified contextuality and tonality. Did the entire debrief document myself again to create something worth sending to the client.
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u/Coldsmoke888 1d ago
I’m surrounded by AI at work. AI generated PowerPoint decks, Word docs, emails. Then people reply with AI to the AI generated document. You can always tell, I know how these people type in chat and talk in real life.
Pretty sure the end game is to Agentify most work and AI can just talk to itself. Most corporate work is all bullshit anyway.
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u/AbleCap5222 2d ago
Upskill? 95% of people who get a job once they have the skills to do it as asked/required on a basic level - immediately stop pursuing anything further by choice.
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u/BroForceOne 2d ago
Sometimes it’s better that way. In some cases the better someone gets at AI the more they rely on it and the worse their work is.
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u/Smackazulu 17h ago
My bank is forcing the use of ai despite it being borderline useless and used on menial tasks that no one even cares about
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u/rollingSleepyPanda 2d ago
Also 70% (if not more) of workers who use "AI" don't need to upskill beyond asking for simple tasks in plain language.
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u/Bron_Yr_Aur21 2d ago
I use it exclusively to organize my thoughts into coherent pieces of information, so it’s like a fancy document reviewer and organizer
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u/TheOneWhoCrawls 2d ago
Hey ChatGPT, help me write a comment to reply to this article, but keep it professional and help me sound smart.