How Generative AI Can Power People at Work
In nearly every workplace, people spend their day on common, time-consuming tasks that eat away at productivity or impact their work-life balance. If those tasks could be supported by generative AI, employers and workers could reallocate time to the things that need a more human touch and mean more to their customers. At an individual level, even small amounts of time saved with generative AI can help people feel more in control of their job and achieve a better work/life balance.
For this Skills Outlook we wanted to know which everyday tasks, the ones done in millions of workplaces around the world, could be easily supported by generative AI. Using our own AI powered workforce planning modelling we’ve identified the top 10 job tasks, in five countries (Australia, Brazil, India, the US and UK) with the most time reclaimed by using generative AI in the next three years.
We found the potential for employers and their employees to reallocate millions of work hours to more valuable tasks by using generative AI to help them on the job.
The work this technology can most effectively support is focused on certain tasks related to maintaining records, data collection, or researching and compiling information for others.
Country-wide work hours per week
reclaimed due to Gen AI by 2026
Gen AI could help Australian workers reclaim nearly 6 million hours a week
Develop educational programmes, plans, or procedures (233,000 hours)
Maintain health or medical records (222,000 hours)
Maintain current knowledge in area of expertise (184,000 hours)
Gen AI could help Brazilian workers reclaim over 6 million hours a week
Develop educational programmes, plans, or procedures (339,000 hours)
Maintain current knowledge in area of expertise (271,000 hours)
Develop safety standards, policies, or procedures (253,000 hours)
Gen AI could help Indian workers reclaim nearly 51 million hours a week
Promote products, services, or programmes (4,387,000 hours)
Collect data about consumer needs or opinions (3,875,000 hours)
Develop marketing or promotional materials (3,514,000 hours)
Gen AI could help UK workers reclaim nearly 19 million hours a week
Maintain current knowledge in area of expertise (679,000 hours)
Develop educational programmes, plans, or procedures (665,000 hours)
Create visual designs or displays (525,000 hours)
Gen AI could help US workers reclaim nearly 78 million hours a week
Maintain health or medical records (3,568,000 hours)
Maintain current knowledge in area of expertise (3,131,000 hrs)
Develop educational programmes, plans or procedures (2,946,000 hrs)
What can employers do next?
At Pearson we believe that the future of work can be one where people can use Generative AI to enhance human potential.
Companies and their workers can reallocate time to focus on the high value work that humans do best: strategic thinking, collaboration, caring for others, decision making, innovation, problem solving, empathy, leadership.
One of the best ways for employers and employees to adapt and stay relevant is to help predict the skills that people will need for the future, so that they can prepare for the changes to come.
The world of work is changing fast. Pearson helps organizations understand, retain and enhance their most vital asset - their people. To learn more about using real-time data to analyse and future-proof your workforce contact us
How did we decide which tasks would be most impacted?
Census and other workforce datasets were consolidated to create a single view of the current workforce in the US, UK, Australia, India and Brazil. Using Pearson’s proprietary occupations ontology of 5,600 jobs and 76,000 tasks, each job can be viewed as a collection of tasks. This allows our machine learning algorithms to calculate future technology impact at a task level.
We looked at hours currently spent, countrywide, in the US (Brazil, India, UK and Australia) on work tasks each week, and then calculated what this would be in three years' time as Gen AI technology is adopted into the workplace. We then identified the tasks which would have the greatest hours reduced by the technology (specifically LLM Chatbots and AI Text-to-Visual Media Generators).