Majority of employees want GenAI in their lives

Employees are embracing generative AI and its capabilities, with 86 percent of respondents to a new survey saying they want to use GenAI at work, and 52 percent seeing GenAI as a great tool to find more relevant information.

The study, of over 2,000 US adults conducted by Arlington Research for Coveo, finds 56 percent of respondents believe GenAI tools would save them at least an hour a day at work. However, more than 50 percent of respondents' companies don't have a GenAI policy in place to enable their employees to leverage these capabilities safely and privately.

It's not just in the workplace either, more than half of respondents want to see GenAI as part of their shopping experience too. Approximately 40 percent would recommend GenAI/chatbots despite their limitations in shopping and customer service contexts. 69 percent expect quick and accurate responses from AI-driven chatbots, 63 percent want problem-solving assistance, 50 percent would like GenAI help in finding products, and 79 percent are comfortable using GenAI for customer support or service-related inquiries.

People do want to know who, or what, they're dealing with though. 63 percent of respondents say it's important to know whether they're interacting with a human or a chatbot. This is possibly due to the fact that almost 66 percent of respondents are familiar with 'hallucinations', or the potential for GenAI to create semantically correct text that is factually wrong.

"The desire for a human in the loop brings to light key consumer and employee concerns with accuracy and security," says Patrick Martin, general manager of service solutions at Coveo. "A whopping 93 percent say they have concerns about using GenAI chatbots, 62 percent cite data privacy as their top concern, followed by 73 percent of respondents that say the accuracy of results is paramount. Using secure content retrieval and linking to the source of truth for fact checking is an imperative for employees and customers."

You can get the full report from the Coveo site.

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