Ask ten people how they use AI and you’ll get ten different answers. Some weave it into their daily work. Others haven’t touched it at all.
The word task is worth pausing on. Most regular users of ChatGPT and its cousins seem less interested in wholesale job replacement and more focused on automating specific tasks. Think of it as a digital assistant that takes care of the repetitive bits rather than a robot stealing your job.
The productivity impact is wildly uneven. Some see little or no gain. Others call it transformative. In most cases, it isn’t eliminating jobs outright, except perhaps grunt work like simple coding, but it is reshaping how people spend their time. Instead of vanishing, roles are evolving. People shift toward higher-value activities that build on what AI produces.
A recent OpenAI study helps quantify this shift, summarised in this graphic. The standout surprise: only 10% of users pay for a ChatGPT subscription. Given the billions being sunk into infrastructure by the LLM providers, that number points to a future where the providers are anticipating dramatic increases in usage, and are betting big with their Capex. It also means that business models will also change dramatically.
If you want to predict how AI will shape work, don’t look only at the tech. Look at how organisations themselves are changing. Structure and process are leading indicators. Change of the kind anticipated, and what we see starting to happen only occurs under strong leadership with a clear vision. Without the leadership, the power of the status quo exerts itself, and change becomes combative and the results disappointing. This will be the case with the evolution of AI.
MIT research reported in Harvard Business Review shows a brutal number: 95% of AI pilots fail.
That begs the question: what are the 5% who succeed doing differently? Academics, as they do, put their answer into a neat framework: the SHAPE Index. It highlights five traits: Strategic Agility, Human-Centricity, Applied Curiosity, Performance Drive, and Ethical Stewardship. The words may sound fluffy, but the underlying logic is sound. The real hurdle is moving from buzzwords to execution in organisations built to defend the status quo.
One thing is certain: sitting on the fence isn’t an option. AI is already changing the way we work. The only real choice is whether you shape it, or let it shape you.
Are you in the 95% waiting for AI to fail or the 5% figuring out how to make it work?
