AI rework is a nagging problem, even as technology booms

Source Domain: www.itbrew.com

Often pitched as an efficiency boon, AI has endured some harsh press lately as those promises run up against the hard realities of what the workforce is experiencing.

IT pros are finding the challenges of AI can, at times, outweigh the benefits—and even slow down workflows: Research from the Harvard Business Review in February revealed that, for all the promises of AI efficiency, actual deployment of the technology has led to an increase in task time.

Having to redo work originally created by AI is becoming a problem for IT teams—and looking for solutions is increasingly important for companies and organizations hoping to streamline operations.

Changing priorities. Part of why AI rework has become such a chronic problem is, paradoxically, the rise in automating tasks. As Nullify CEO Shan Kulkarni told IT Brew, removing human oversight of AI work in exchange for trusting the outputs means that staff often must step in to address mistakes that would have been caught earlier on. On the brighter side, it’s an evolution that may eventually smooth itself out.

“It’s going to go down over time, at least for like a subset of tasks,” Kulkarni said. “The model is going to get so good at performing them that the work required to review, or redo, the outputs is going to gradually reduce and then drop off over time.”

Research on AI from Workday in January found that AI efficiency, at least in terms of time saved, hasn’t paid off on the backend: Around 37% of those time savings needed to be invested in rework, according to the global survey of 3,200 leaders and employees in the tech sector.

Choked up. Kulkarni views that kind of rework as a “bottleneck,” he told IT Brew, but one that agents will get through sooner or later. The key to AI efficiency, as he sees it, is to ensure that harnessing AI agents results in efficiency by using agents to review the work of other agents. However, it’s critical to make that chain work correctly to erase the need for…

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