AI may make workers faster, but it is not necessarily productive.

Generated AI could be the first technological advance that will enable more powerful automation of services and knowledge work. Call Center Or a management consultant. But will it really lead to productivity gains for workers to generate emails and PowerPoint presentations faster? Ramine Tinati, lead of Accenture’s Apac Center for Advanced AI, speaks on Fortune Brainstorming AI Singapore Last week’s meeting was not so sure.

“Giving employees the tools to do things faster, they do it faster. But are they more productive? Perhaps not, because they make it faster and then go to a coffee break,” explained Tinati.

Instead, “If you reinvent your work, all of a sudden, those coffee breaks won’t be meaningless anymore because you’re doing something else,” Tinati said, adding that some Asian companies may be slow to adopt AI because they “don’t think about reinventing your work.” (Accenture is the founding partner of Brainstorm ai)

Of course, businesses have embraced the form of artificial intelligence for years to increase productivity, even before ChatGPT was released in late 2022. May Yap, chief information officer at ManufacturingSolutionsProvider Jabil, said her company is considering an outline of Scatches and Bulmishes, a so-called golden eye, the troop of workers, using automation and AI.

“Golden Eye” workers spend eight hours a day on testing, and working long means “errors creep up,” Yap said. AI has helped to intensify the testing process to explain errors from human workers.

Chie Wei Ann, Chief AI Officer of Singapore’s Home Team Science and Technology Agency, said it is a government agency that develops technical capabilities for national security.

“It looks like part of the information extraction…200% (improvement), and that’s a huge improvement in terms of ROI,” Ang said.

But Ang also noted that beyond productivity gains, advances in AI can do things that Singapore’s home teams have failed to like to deal with new kinds of crime and emergency situations. The Singapore home team has 10 departments, including police, emergency services and immigration authorities.

stretch

AI inevitably leads to some unemployment as certain roles become obsolete. But it can interfere with employees who are worried about being automated from work. employee Already reporting concerns That they are being used to train AI alternatives.

Panelists agreed last week that the advancement of affected employees would move people into adjacent roles.

“Transformation is scary, right? When you hear the word transformation, people don’t like it,” Jabir’s Yap said last week. She revealed that Jabil wanted to augment the human labor rather than replace it. She added that “general skill sets” and “good leadership traits” cannot be taken away by AI, regardless of how other tasks are automated.

Ang added, “It’s very difficult to find in Singapore, where you’re familiar with (generating AI).” This means that his team hired people with adjacent skill sets without any direct experience. Another limit? The home team is short of GPUs as the home team has to work with the on-site processor due to the sensitive nature of its work.

And Tinati was optimistic that AI could free human employees to tackle something more productive. “Their skills are now uplifted to do other things, whether they are supervising their job or learning other skills that can support higher-order tasks in the development cycle,” he said.