The University of Manchester is scrutinizing why growing adoption of AI tools has so far failed to translate into the forecast productivity gains, however, researchers are struggling to give easy answers to close the "AI ambition gap." In a report, also called “ The AI Ambition Gap ,” the UK university’s Productivity Institute mulls over the advances that have been made in AI and the expanding adoption of it, and sets out what business leaders and policymakers can do to realize the potential benefits. The report was commissioned by IT services biz Bytes Technology Group . One reason for the lack of results is that organizations have invested heavily up front on retraining staff, reorganizing the way they work and other adjustments. Those costs show up straight away, yet the payback doesn’t come until later. Another reason, the report suggests, is that AI tools can raise productivity at the level of individual tasks, but these gains do not automatically translate into greater productivity across a worker’s whole role or the entire organization. It cites the example of software developers using GitHub Copilot who completed around 26 percent more tasks, and professionals using ChatGPT for routine writing and analysis that reduced task completion time by 40 percent while improving the quality of the output by 18 percent. However, a study of AI dev tools found these have increased coding activity by approximately 240 percent, while the number of actual software releases has only grown by about 30 percent. The gap is due to humans still needing to check and test their work before release. High task exposure to AI does not automatically make a worker more productive, the researchers say. Jobs typically combine automatable activities with tasks that require judgement, coordination, client interaction and critical thinking. As AI removes or accelerates some activities, those complementary human tasks become the constraint on time saving and the translation of task-level gains into greater productivity
Job outcomes therefore depend on task composition and complementary human expertise, the report continues. It suggests AI may in part displace labor from existing tasks, while also creating new tasks in which workers retain a comparative advantage. This could be good news for the UK, the researchers state. Compared with five other nations (US, Brazil, Colombia, India and South Africa), Blighty has the highest share of workers in occupations with both high exposure to AI and "high complementarity," it claims…