AI is making work faster, but creation of better jobs won’t be automatic

Counting the jobs that artificial intelligence creates or eliminates will tell us only part of its economic impact. Just as important is what happens inside those jobs: whether employees spend less time on tedious tasks, develop new skills or gain opportunities to advance. Helping people work faster is valuable, but it is not the same as making their jobs better.

Among U.S. employees who have used AI in their jobs at least a few times in the past year, 63 percent say it helps them complete tasks faster. That is according to new findings from the American Job Quality Study — a partnership between Jobs for the Future, The Families and Workers Fund and Gallup. Forty-six percent said AI helps them produce higher-quality work, and 47 percent said it allows them to spend more time on the most interesting parts of their jobs.

Finishing a task faster creates an opportunity. Whether that opportunity becomes more rewarding work, a chance to learn or simply another assignment depends on the decisions employers make.

The benefits also start from an uneven distribution of use. Forty percent of college graduates use AI at least weekly, compared with 17 percent of employees without a college degree. Managers are more likely to use it regularly than individual contributors. And 52 percent of regular users hold jobs meeting the study’s multidimensional job-quality criteria, compared with 32 percent of employees who never use AI.

That does not mean AI created those better jobs. The same groups that tend to hold quality jobs — including more educated employees and managers — also tend to use AI. AI use is also highly concentrated among........

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