Intel Admits AI Decreases Productivity

The house of cards is wobbling.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

AI will automate or assist almost every aspect of our lives in the coming years, making our jobs and even personal lives easier and more productive. It’s even meant to be the key to unlocking our next great economic boom and is being lauded by multiple governments as a way the West can counteract the East’s aggressive economic growth. Naturally, it’s no wonder the AI revolution is being so heavily pushed, right? Well, no. In fact, Intel just discovered that AI doesn’t actually improve productivity at all…

Though Intel is struggling in the AI infrastructure race against its competitors like Nvidia, it is still pushing AI software. Many of its hardware partners are launching AI PCs, which use AIs like Microsoft’s Copilot to automate tasks on the machine. As such, Intel has a vested interest in these AIs, as it could mean more people will buy their componentry.

Unfortunately for Intel, when analysing how much time AI PCs can save people, they didn’t find what they were looking for.

This began with a study that looked at how 6,000 people in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom used their PCs and found that people lose, on average, 15 hours a week on “digital chores” like writing emails, sorting calendars, transcribing meetings, managing files, and similar. This study identified that many of these tasks can be automated with PC AIs, potentially saving 4 of those 15 hours per week.

However, this was only in theory. This study didn’t look at how these AIs can do this, or even if they can do it well. As such, the reality of doing this in practice is very different.

Intel’s extended study, which tried to see if AI can save time and boost productivity, found that “current AI PC owners spend longer on tasks than their counterparts using traditional PCs.” According to the study, the users of these AIs spent a long time trying to identify “how best to communicate with AI tools to get the desired answers or response,” which is why they took longer. However, there is also a stark lack of data in the report on how much time was spent monitoring and correcting these AIs’ outputs, as this is an infamous flaw of AI, which we will come to in a minute. This omission, combined with Intel’s perplexingly optimistic summary of the study, which stated that people need to be better educated on using these AI tools, feels like their conflict of interest is massively clouding their judgement.

And it isn’t just Intel that found that AI simply doesn’t deliver on its promised productivity gains.