New CEO Flex: boasts that AI handles X% accurately of its work

This is the latest CEO Flex. Quotes the numbers that indicate that the AI ​​is lifting heavily internally. This move presents the company as going ahead of the AI ​​curve and constantly grabs the attention of important people.

Investors hear the magical words that the business is on track to save money, but perhaps achieved, but not explicitly stated through future recruitment. It also shows clients from large tech companies that they declare that they should open their wallet, Pronto, to incorporate more AI into their operations or risk falling behind.

However, it is difficult to ultimately know how important these CEOs are from Salesforce, Google and Microsoft. The metrics cited seem accurate, but when asked, their spokesman refused to provide details on how the numbers were calculated or how they defined the work that AI claimed to have done.

“The truth is, in the age of AI, there is still no general framework for measuring what ‘job percentage’ actually means,” said Malvika Jethmalani, founder of the Human Capital Advisory Firm Atvis Group. luck. “Are you affected by lines of code, task completion, time savings, or business outcomes?”

For example, in Lex Fridman Podcast, Pichai I explained it AI coding tools like Goose are calculated by increasing the productivity of Google engineers by about 10% and tracking the time saved each week. However, that number assumes that the engineer will use these extra hours to work more, rather than loosen it.

The metric that AI tools are responsible for generating 30% of all new software code in Google is similarly fuzzy. Does a number refer to the raw line of code proposed, committed by the programmer, or code that the code has accepted into production?

Benioff was even more vague. In an interview, he explained the ability of AI to do half of his company’s work as a “digital labor revolution,” but he didn’t clarify what

“Work” has meaning in this context. For example, he used AI to refer to Salesforce’s corporate plans to his co-authors, but did not elaborate on what the plan was or how much AI contributed. Did it suggest an outline of the plan or did it contribute to some of the text? Was the proposal held in the final document?

However, other experts say that comments like Benioff aren’t flexing at all, they are simply the reality of AI that will change the world of work. Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, luck That generative AI, in his view, changes the work of knowledge workers significantly, without generating mass layoffs. “As developed countries face workforce and talent shortages, more automation is our biggest promise to provide long-term competitiveness,” he said.

But while the CEO’s statement may have some truth to how much work is already done by AI, the numbers are very vague and abstract, says Netherlands-based labor psychologist Marais Bester. “We often see CEOs using this type of language,” he said. “I think it’s also like a metric for employees. From a business psychology perspective, it’s not good leadership, he added.

“I was actually a bit disappointed with the comment,” he said. “I don’t think we’re heading for a space that’s solely AI technology used as employees within our organization.

Flex can even cause anxiety among employees who are hearing “we’re automating you,” Jessmalani said. “That kind of message can erode trust and undermine adoption when employees want to experiment and innovate AI and are willing to innovate and innovate AI.”

Shonna Waters, an organizational psychologist and CEO of advisory firms, promotes Benioff’s amount of Salesforce using AI and its adoption of the company’s AgentForce platform to manage AI agents. Gartner Many of these AI-driven projects suggest that they are likely to fail by 2027, as their value is unknown.

“I think it’s really the stage where companies really set the stage for how they integrate AI into organizational design,” she said, adding that companies must also deal with the disconnect between what C-Suite executives say about AI and what is actually happening.

“These leaders make these bold claims and our employees are experiencing quite different things,” she said. She explained that CEOs often have more optimism about AI than employees.

Successful companies will become businesses with “structural empathy,” that is, those who build systems that bring the voices of frontline workers, she said. “At the end of the day, you need to be the person who actually employs the AI ​​you need to work with and understand how to do it in coordination with them, as opposed to what you’re doing with them.”

According to Bester, the CEO may be using the Flex as more than its competitors can boast. They say, “Look at us, we’re ahead of the curve about this.” A better message from Benioff is, “We’ll be able to do more than we already do in terms of how we’re using AI and leveraging the strength of human capital we already have, in terms of creating efficiency and better value for our customers.”

For now, CEOs are “clearly wanting to show stakeholders that they’re riding on AI,” focusing on shareholder efficiency, margins and built value,” added Bester.

Or if they have to queue up people if AI proves they can’t do that much work. In May, just months after Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski promoted AI’s ability to replace human workers. reverse The company announced that AI-driven employment freezes and the company is adding more staff. He told Bloomberg that Klarna is currently hiring customers to ensure they can talk to real people at all times. “From a brand perspective, from a company perspective, it’s very important that there’s always a person whenever necessary, because it’s clear to the customer,” he said.