0:01

Today on the AI Daily Brief, we're looking

0:03

at a fascinating new study that shows that

0:05

knowledge workers are bringing AI to work

0:07

whether their bosses want them to or not. Before

0:10

that in our headline section, why Apple's

0:13

iPad ad controversy is actually about

0:15

AI anxiety. The AI

0:17

Daily Brief is a daily podcast that video about the

0:19

most important news and discussions in AI. To

0:21

join the discussion, check out the Discord link in the show notes. Welcome

0:25

back to the AI Daily Brief headline edition.

0:27

All the AI headline news you need in

0:29

around five minutes. Today my

0:31

friends is a very slow news day in the

0:33

world of AI. I mean crawling relative to what

0:35

we're used to. Cool thing about that

0:37

is it gives me a chance to go a little bit more

0:40

in depth on a story that I might not have had time

0:42

to that I think is actually really important. But before I get

0:44

into that, I also want to talk about why it's slow right

0:46

now. Matt Wolf, AI YouTuber,

0:48

podcast host, and entrepreneur had a

0:50

great tweet summarizing exactly what's going

0:52

on. TLDR, this is probably the

0:55

calm before the storm. Matt writes,

0:57

for anyone thinking that AI is slow

0:59

right now, keep in mind over the

1:01

next several weeks we have Google IO,

1:03

a rumored open AI product event, Microsoft

1:06

Build, Computex, Cisco Live, and Apple Worldwide

1:08

Developer Conference. These are the events where

1:10

the big announcements are made. Point being,

1:12

if it feels slow, don't worry, it's not gonna for

1:14

long. But because there's a little more

1:16

space, I want to talk about this Apple ad that

1:18

has caused so much controversy this week. If

1:21

you haven't seen it, basically the goal

1:23

of the ad is to show the

1:25

new ultra thin iPad as the recipient

1:27

and the natural inheritor of all human

1:29

creativity. The unfortunate choice they

1:31

made about how to demonstrate that

1:34

was they showed all of these

1:36

different tools of creativity, musical instruments,

1:38

synthesizers, record players, books, basically this

1:40

world of analog creative devices, all

1:43

smashed and crushed down to nothing with the end

1:45

result being of course the tiny little iPad. People

1:49

hated this ad. I

1:51

mean, this really hated it. They

1:53

talked about how angry Steve Jobs would have been

1:55

if he saw this. They talked about how it

1:58

broke Apple's legacy of actually being the computer. company

2:00

for creatives. But I think

2:02

a big part of the reason that the ad

2:04

struck such a nerve was not about Apple or

2:06

creativity in general. It's a very

2:09

specific AI anxiety. Alison

2:11

Morrow from CNN captures this in her piece

2:13

today, Welcome to the AI Dystopia No One

2:15

Asked For courtesy of Silicon Valley. Basically

2:18

the gist of the post is that one

2:20

of the central fears around AI hold aside

2:22

any far flung fears of AI x-risk and

2:25

robots taking over from humans and all that

2:27

sort of stuff. One of the much more

2:29

current and present fears is the destruction of

2:31

creative industries. It's AI

2:33

replacing illustrators, AI replacing writers,

2:36

AI replacing painters, AI replacing

2:38

musicians. This is palpable

2:40

in society right now. It's palpable in

2:42

lawsuits right now. In fact, if I

2:44

were a betting man, I'd bet that

2:46

a bigger portion of people who have

2:48

a negative feeling about AI have a

2:51

negative feeling about AI because of those

2:53

reasons, their concerns around how it impacts

2:55

human creative industries and human creative pursuits

2:57

than fears of Terminator style futures. Along

3:00

comes this Apple ad that

3:02

basically visualizes that exact point.

3:05

It obliterates the entire legacy

3:07

of human analog creativity and

3:09

says, look, here's a tiny

3:11

thin screen. The response was

3:13

so significant that Apple actually issued an

3:15

apology, which is not a normal thing

3:17

that Apple does. Indeed, the New

3:20

York Times writes, Apple doesn't make mistakes often

3:22

and seldom apologizes. But on Thursday, its head

3:24

of advertising said the company had aired in

3:26

making a new iPad commercial that showed an

3:28

industrial compressor flattening tools for art, music and

3:30

creativity. Tormiran, the company's vice president

3:32

of marketing communication, said, creativity is in our

3:34

DNA at Apple and it's incredibly important to

3:36

us to design products that empower creatives all

3:38

over the world. Our goal is always

3:41

to celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and

3:43

bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the

3:45

mark with this video and we're sorry. In

3:47

addition to the apology, they pulled all paid media spent

3:49

from the ad. It's no longer on TV. It's no

3:52

longer being promoted on the Internet. And

3:54

honestly, for me, the number of people involved

3:56

in making an ad like this is significantly

3:58

more than you might think. The fact

4:00

that none of them noticed that this

4:02

might cause this reaction shows a very

4:04

particular tone deafness that is unfortunately exactly

4:06

what Silicon Valley is being accused of

4:08

when it comes to this next generation

4:10

of AI and other technology, that's

4:13

pretty glaring. Meanwhile, case in

4:15

point, musical artist Cheryl Crow was also

4:17

in the news today, somewhat randomly, demanding

4:19

that lawmakers act now on AI. In

4:21

a column for the Hollywood Reporter, she

4:23

wrote, So

4:52

anyways, big miss for Apple this week. Although that wasn't the only

4:54

place they were in the news, Bloomberg is also reporting that Apple

4:56

is planning to power the development of its AI tools with in-house

4:58

server chips starting as early as this year. We've

5:21

been hearing rumors that the company has been designing

5:23

its own high-end chips for its data centers, and

5:25

it appears that that is happening sooner rather than

5:27

later. writes Bloomberg, Apple's

5:29

plan to use its own chips and process AI

5:31

tasks in the cloud was hatched about three years

5:34

ago, but the company accelerated the timeline after the

5:36

AI craze, fueled by OpenAI's chat GPT and Google's

5:38

Gemini, forced it to move more quickly. The

5:40

first AI server chips will be the M2 Ultra

5:42

Bloomberg writes, which was launched last year as part

5:44

of the Mac Pro and Mac Studio computers, though

5:46

the company is already eyeing future versions based on

5:48

the M4 chip. As we've said before,

5:51

it's going to be a steady drip of

5:53

leaks, I think, between here and WWDC. And

5:55

if you think you are anticipating what Apple's

5:57

going to say, it's Nothing compared to how much

5:59

the market is. What's the know? what Apple's going to

6:01

say? For. Now though, that is going to

6:03

do it for the Ai Daily brief headlines edition

6:05

of next the main episode. And

6:08

the listener of the show I have a

6:10

strong feeling you like to stay up to

6:13

date on all things artificial intelligence, including it's

6:15

impact on the workforce, which is why I

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highly recommend checking out Managing the Future of

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Business School Hps Professors Bill Courage or Fuller

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and demographic shifts that are reshaping the nature

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come back to the ideally brief one

7:36

of the big topics of conversation around

7:38

artificial. Intelligence right now. Is. If

7:40

and how it is actually useful in the

7:43

workplace. There. Has been this low grade

7:45

conversation constantly ever since the launch of

7:47

Chassis Be T that's basically out a sub

7:49

seem of well yeah, these things are cool,

7:51

but are they actually useful. Oftentimes.

7:54

the contra argument for why they're not

7:56

so useful and just typed up has

7:58

been low rates of adoption in a

8:01

top-down enterprise kind of way. You'll

8:03

often see statistics in the media around how

8:05

CXOs are slow walking a little bit their

8:07

adoption of AI because they're not sure where

8:09

the ROI is happening. Now

8:11

my argument has long been that all

8:14

of these things, all of

8:16

these studies, all of these surveys, all of

8:18

these statements are completely wrongheaded and totally missed

8:20

the mark of how AI adoption is actually

8:23

happening. I believe that AI is

8:25

not being adopted in a top-down sort of

8:27

way where like the cloud and IT manager

8:29

makes a decision about a tool and then

8:31

spreads it to everyone in the company. Instead,

8:33

I believe it's being adopted bottoms up. Individual

8:36

employees are experimenting with tools often in their

8:38

own time and certainly with their own email

8:40

addresses, figuring out what works for them, and

8:42

then slowly and sometimes sneakily bringing it into

8:44

the office, and mostly not telling people for

8:46

fear of being told that they're not allowed

8:48

to use it anymore. What's

8:50

more, I think that the impact of AI

8:53

is not about entire categories of jobs just

8:55

suddenly vanishing from the earth. Instead, I think

8:57

it's all about small but significant wins day

8:59

in, day out where employees either save time

9:01

or do better work in a way that

9:04

is at once tiny but in the aggregate

9:06

huge. In other words, think about it

9:08

like this. If you used to make

9:10

YouTube thumbnails manually and it took you 35 minutes and

9:12

now you make them with AI and it takes you

9:15

five minutes, let's imagine that you do that daily. Well

9:17

that's 30 minutes a day, that's two and a half

9:19

hours a week, that's 10 hours a month, that's 120

9:21

hours a year, which if you're thinking about an average

9:23

40-hour workweek is three weeks of time that you just

9:26

got back. And that's to say nothing

9:28

of potential quality improvements. So I'm

9:30

ranting of course, but this is because this has

9:32

seemed incredibly obvious to me when you actually interact

9:34

with anyone who's using AI at work. It's

9:37

everyone and they're not getting caught up on questions of

9:39

ROI, they're just figuring out how these tools are incredibly

9:41

useful right now and they don't want to give it

9:43

up. This is an enterprise

9:46

technology category that has consumer adoption

9:48

dynamics. Once you have used AI

9:50

to continue this example to make YouTube thumbnails, you

9:52

are absolutely never going back to the way that

9:54

you did it before. Well

9:56

now we have a study that has

9:58

finally started to put some some numbers

10:00

around this thesis. It's a

10:02

report from Microsoft and LinkedIn called the

10:05

2024 Work Trend Index. They

10:07

titled it AI at Work is Here, now

10:09

comes the hard part. Here is

10:11

the big banner headline. The way the Microsoft

10:13

sums it up, employees want AI

10:15

at work and won't wait for companies

10:18

to catch up. Specifically, 75%

10:20

of knowledge workers now use AI

10:22

at work. As we'll get

10:24

into in a minute, they report incredible value

10:26

around it being time saving, boosting their creativity,

10:28

allowing them to focus on their most important

10:30

work. Contrast that with the

10:33

top down boss led AI adoption.

10:35

On the one hand, 79% of leaders

10:37

agree that AI adoption is critical to remain

10:39

competitive, but 59% of them worry

10:42

about quantifying the productivity gains of AI. And

10:45

60% of them say their company lacks a vision or plan to

10:47

implement it. And so they're stuck and they

10:49

don't do anything, or maybe they do just some small

10:51

proof of concepts. The resulting phenomenon is

10:53

something that Microsoft and LinkedIn call BYOAI,

10:57

bring your own AI. In short, 78% of AI users

11:00

are bringing their own tools to work. That

11:03

means they're not using some tool that the enterprise

11:05

has set up for them, they're just using an

11:07

individual tool that works for them. Knowledge workers, in

11:09

other words, are voting with their feet and they're

11:11

saying we are not going to wait for you

11:13

to catch up. We are going to use these

11:15

tools right now. For employers, there

11:17

are huge problems with this. Some of them

11:19

are about the downside. There are real security

11:21

issues when it comes to company data if

11:23

it's being fed into commercial tools. However,

11:26

I think that the biggest miss here is

11:28

the miss on all the benefits that come

11:30

as this distributed network of employees is actually

11:32

figuring out what works. The Vanguard

11:34

kid in the marketing department could be sharing

11:37

what she learned with all the other folks

11:39

over in the accounting department, but instead all

11:41

of that knowledge is remaining trapped, stuck in

11:43

people's heads, not able to actually impact productivity

11:46

more broadly. And it's not just that these

11:48

employees are not really sharing this, it's that

11:50

they're actively avoiding talking about it. 52%

11:54

of people who are using AI at work are reluctant

11:56

to admit using it for their most important tasks. 53%

11:58

of people who use AI AI at work worry

12:01

that using it on important work tasks makes them

12:03

look replaceable. In other words,

12:05

we've created an entire generation of professional

12:07

AI smugglers. It's really

12:09

important to note that the people who

12:11

use these technologies really, really report incredible

12:14

benefits from them. 90%

12:16

of users say that AI helps them save time, 85%

12:18

say that it helps them focus on their most

12:21

important work, 84% say it helps them be more creative, and 83%

12:23

says it helps them enjoy

12:27

their work more. 83%

12:30

of these knowledge workers like

12:33

their jobs more because they're using

12:35

these AI tools. Compare

12:37

that with other studies which find that 68% of

12:39

people, for example, say they struggle with the pace

12:41

and volume of work. Nearly

12:43

half, 46% say they feel burned out.

12:46

It is insane to me that a

12:48

technology that is having such a big

12:51

impact on those challenges isn't being screamed

12:53

from the halls by every boss, manager,

12:55

director, and CEO. The

12:57

good news is I don't think that this is a state that's going

12:59

to last long. In our experience at

13:02

Superintelligent, a significant number of enterprise leaders

13:04

are coming around to the idea that

13:06

the right way to adopt AI is

13:08

in fact bottoms up, to empower their

13:10

employees to experiment, experiment safely,

13:12

but experiment, figure out what works, and

13:14

then share that with their colleagues. I

13:17

think once we break through and normalize this just

13:19

a little bit more, the floodgates are going to

13:21

come open with incredible benefits to follow. Anyways,

13:24

friends, slightly different type of AI Daily Brief

13:26

today. As we discussed in the headline section,

13:28

it's a slightly slow news day, I think because there is

13:30

so much in the way of big events and announcements coming

13:32

up in the next few weeks. But

13:34

I think that this one is really important. I think

13:36

that the study is shining light on something that doesn't

13:38

get talked about enough, and I'm glad it's now out.

13:41

For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI

13:43

Daily Brief. Until next time, peace.