AI Hurting Quality For Experienced Employees, Helps Others With Speed

A study by Stanford University found that experienced employees using AI often produce lower-quality work, while less experienced staff become more productive and efficient with AI assistance. 

The research, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, analyzed nearly 5,200 customer service agents and found that AI use led to more cases being marked as “resolved” but at the cost of quality, as customers were less likely to escalate complaints when AI interacted with them.

The impact of AI on productivity varied significantly across workers, with skilled employees seeing a drop in output quality, while less capable ones improved, according to Yahoo News.

Concerns over AI replacing human jobs remain, particularly with the potential for robots to replace workers in agriculture and manufacturing by mid-century, according to Morgan Stanley.

Despite fears of mass unemployment, University College London’s Maria del Rio-Chanona suggests a more nuanced future, with AI creating new roles for complementary skills. 

While AI’s “hallucinations” (inaccurate outputs) have been criticized, proponents argue that AI could surpass human capabilities by 2027, a prediction fueled by the arrival of advanced, cost-effective AI systems like DeepSeek’s R1 (a Chinese-made variant).