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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently conducted an experiment, reported in a working paper, with 444 “college-educated professionals” who were given a “midlevel professional writing task” like drafting news releases or delicate emails. Half were provided with ChatGPT and half weren’t. The participants who were given ChatGPT took less time, wrote better and reported enjoying the task more. Even more important, perhaps, ChatGPT helped “low-ability workers,” meaning that those with weaker writing skills — but perhaps with good ideas — could carry out the task effectively.
ChatGPT can do that for writing assignments, but it can do it even better for coding tasks. Seemingly impossible undertakings, like making a new dashboard to track heat maps of weekly sales in Excel, will be easy. By breaking down complex analytic problems into small steps, like Ford engineers did for the Model T, employees will be able to make their own assembly lines of data, freeing them to do more creative work. Call it everyday automation.
I realize that automating your everyday tasks can be scary. If a macro can generate your daily report in five seconds rather than the five hours it takes you, what is your value? It’s tempting to see ourselves, or our employees, as nothing more than those repetitive tasks. We can’t imagine a world where those same employees could do more.
But if a company can take this momentous step from avoiding to embracing everyday automation, it will have a competitive edge. Companies that promote workers who can automate the tedious parts of their jobs will be more profitable in the long run, because those employees can then do more complicated, more rewarding, more human work. Almost by definition, the work that cannot be automated will be better paid.
Until now, you’d have to ask the I.T. department to help automate part of your work flow. But with ChatGPT anyone will be able to do it, with just a little training. As with Ford’s assembly line, the challenge today is no longer technological but organizational.
It’s true that some shortsighted corporations would be happy to do the same work they do now but with fewer people. But my suspicion is that most successful businesses will realize the long-term potential of encouraging workers to solve harder problems.
Changing the way companies are organized is much harder than upgrading software. Despite what you read in the news, most of us don’t work at Google or Amazon. We work at the same sorts of companies that existed in 1973, that tried to go paperless but never quite made it. Real change might take a generation or two — but hopefully not.
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