This week on the Friday 15, Andy & Brian discuss whether workers are afraid to be honest about their AI usage at work.  We’ve heard senior team members talk openly about how they’re using AI to be more efficient, but are junior employees perceived as lazy if they use these new tools?

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Brian Beck: Welcome to Friday 15 with Master B2B. My name’s Brian Beck. I’m here with Andy Hoar. Let’s get into our breaking news. We just came out of cyber week and the Cyber five and some big numbers on the consumer side. Look at this significant growth year over year, even at this scale. EMarketer came out with some numbers and they nailed it. Right?

Andy Hoar: Yeah, I got to give credit. So Zia Daniell Wigder who runs the research arm for eMarketer is my former boss from Forrester Research. And I was really impressed. They really nailed it. So Black Friday, this is a prediction from June. They predicted in June that Black Friday would be $10.76 billion. Adobe has announced a couple days after Black Friday that the number was $10.8 billion. So you don’t get much better than that. And then also Cyber Monday, they estimated in June to be $13.93 billion. And if you see the next slide, the actual number was $13.3 billion. So as an analyst, I have to recognize when people really nailed forecasts. So it’s kind of an intra industry honor code. And so shout out to Zia for her team really nailing it. That’s impressive. But also on this page, if you’ll notice, you put it in a red box. This is a stunning statistic. And if you told something like this even 10 years ago, I think they would have laughed. 57% of this online sales on Cyber Monday were through a mobile device. 57%. I mean, wow. The way in which people buy has definitely changed. I remember way back in the day when people wouldn’t use a credit card online. Remember that? I do. I lived through that in the late 90s.

Brian: We did a whole Friday 15 session on this a few weeks ago, where we talked about, does this impact B2B? And I think we’re seeing total evidence that it does. We’re still, it’s sort of the jury is still out. The numbers are still out. We’ll see how the rest of the season plays out. But just look at Amazon Business, for example. Amazon Business, again, is the one of the biggest players now in B2B commerce. Look at the emails they’re sending out. Save Big with Cyber Monday deals, discover the latest savings, including 50% up to software, 30% off of office products. And they’re talking about deals in IT, in break room, in MRO, in office, different categories. These are B2B categories. And you know, what’s fascinating is just, and again, early numbers here, but anecdotal. Just looking at the numbers we’re getting in from my Enciba business where we manage B2B companies’ Amazon programs. In some cases, some of these companies are up 100% over a normal period of time. During this Cyber Monday or Black Friday, we’re starting to get those numbers in. And we’ve got quite a few clients, including gigantic electronics electrical products, manufacturers and plumbing supply companies. So there’s some real spillover here, Andy over to the B2B side.

Andy: We’ve heard some brand manufacturers even who said, “Not only are we not going to have a presence over the four day period, in particular Black Friday, but a lot of our businesses aren’t even open.” So how do you contrast that with Amazon Business, all these companies having record sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And on Black Friday, many B2B, traditional B2B distributors aren’t even open.

Brian: Well, I’m curious to see what they do through their e-commerce. So that’s the beauty of B2B eCommerce that it be open when your branches aren’t. We’re going to keep monitoring this because I think it’s an interesting dynamic, particularly because now we have all these millennials and Gen Z that are now in the workforce. Certainly, Amazon Business doesn’t do things based on gut. They do it based on data. And so there are reasons they’re doing these deals on these days. And, and we’re seeing it in our Enciba performance with our clients. These are B2B companies. These aren’t shirts and perfume, right? They’re selling plumbing equipment. Anyhow, it’s a real thing.

Andy: It makes the point that the most important thing in the world is customer attention. And you’ve got customer attention on these days. And people who are B2C consumers are also B2B buyers. And so if they’re looking at Amazon to buy something for Christmas for their family. And they’re also buying for work. And you’ve got their attention, especially if you’re like a Home Depot or a Lowe’s, one of these kind of half B2C, half B2B companies. It is bleeding over. It’s putting pressure. And I predict that within a couple of years, all of these B2B companies with very rare exception will be doing Cyber Monday and Black Friday – kind of. So, it may not be called the same thing. I don’t know. But that period of time, they’ll be selling online.

Brian: Well, let’s get into our topic today, which is all about AI. And here’s the question, Andy. Are you being transparent about your use of AI at work? What prompted all this is a really interesting story about the fact that it was a study by Slack that said that 99% of executives plan to invest in AI. So everyone’s talking about, oh, yeah, everyone’s investing in AI. It’s got huge promise. But then nearly 50% of employees are uncomfortable admitting AI use because they’re afraid of being perceived as less confident or lazy. So this is huge disconnect, Andy, right? Between people investing in it and then the people using it and that if you’re afraid to admit you’re using it, what does that do from an innovation standpoint? Companies like Apple and Google and others for decades, and since they’ve been founded, have all been about democratization of innovation. People innovating at the bottom rung and that making its way up the organization. Well, clearly there’s no process here if people don’t talk about it. How are companies going to take advantage of innovation occurring?

Andy: What’s worse than not talking about it, which could be, you know, just the fact that people design in their consciousness. No, they’re avoiding talking about it, which is even more interesting. So if you show the next slide, the top three reasons why. So on the right hand side, the top three reasons workers are uncomfortable sharing that they’re using AI. Number one was they feel like using AI is cheating. Number two, they fear being seen as less confident. This is interesting. And the last one very related to number two is they fear being seen as lazy. And it does raise an interesting question. If the AI is doing the work, then why do you need the people? Now, making the evolution forward that we have to make here is that the people are directing the AI, they’re coordinating the AI, they’re managing the AI for an outcome. And that part’s getting lost. But traditionally speaking, companies have mostly thought about people as producing results that then get coordinated amongst other people. And now maybe that’s going to shift. Maybe it’s going to matter less where you got the information or how you got the information. And more that, you’re finding a way to turn it into revenue, make it work with a larger organization, et cetera. That hasn’t entered the mindset of a lot of managers. And there’s still people who want you to come into the office because they want to see the work you’re doing. We’ll take this one to the next logical conclusion. Not only am I not in the office, I’m not even doing the work. But if I’m producing results, then who cares, right? There’s an argument to be made for that. On the left hand side of the graphic it has an interesting thing. It says, percentage of workers uncomfortable sharing the use of AI for the following tasks. They asked them in more detail – How are you using this stuff? And what are you uncomfortable sharing? Number one was writing messages to your manager. So 34% of people are communicating with their manager using AI, chatGPT. And they’re like, we don’t like talking about that. Number three, stuck out to me, they’re uncomfortable sharing that they’re evaluating the performance of their direct reports by using chatGPT. So basically, they’re telling me, how should I talk to my employee about their performance? And by the way, here’s some things I noticed and they’re having chatGPT essentially do the evaluation.

Brian: Having been a manager many times in my career, one of the most onerous tasks is actually writing up job reports and writing up performance reviews. It’s very time consuming. So I’m sure what people are saying there is, hey, I’m just going “write me a job review for this person”, maybe putting a few data points in. But look, at the end of the day, if it writes a good job review and it’s accurate… If people are using these things to make their jobs more efficient and save time, if you can enter into chatGPT or whatever your tool is, a series of things that that are accurate that say, I’ve noticed my employees doing this, this, this, and this, they do this well. They have opportunities here. And it creates a summary for you and puts it into an organized format. What’s wrong with that? It’s just saving them time.

Andy: But it also kind of brings into question what are you actually doing? Why can’t you just – if you had a more sophisticated sort of collection framework for people’s work, then just have Asana do it for you, which is a project management software. It’ll use ChatGPT if you need to write the job or the performance review. But the other one kind of stood out to me to your point. One thing, 25% of employees said they are uncomfortable talking about using AI to brainstorm new ideas for projects. That was number five on the list. I have to ask myself, why would that be a problem? Why would that be a problem? Why not use ChatGPT to come up with ideas? Why should you waste your time trying to come up with ideas when this thing can crowdsource the whole concept of doing that? So that to me feels strange that people are embarrassed to say that I’m using that.

Brian: I think companies and people have to close the gap here. There’s a trust gap here to some degree. Where people are feeling like, hey, I’m kind of cheating. That’s the number one reason they’re uncomfortable. And it’s not cheating. Companies need to make it okay for people to do this stuff. Now, this also ties back to intent. We’ll get into that in just a minute. But there are historical parallels for this, right, Andy?

Andy: So we were thinking about this and how is this similar to other evolutions in technology. I think this AI one is an order of magnitude more important than other technologies in the past. Do you know what that thing on the left is? It’s a thing in wood. It’s made of what looks like metal or some sort. And it looks like it could be a musical instrument. Well, that is the first known image of an actual calculator. From the 1730s or something like that. But what’s interesting about this calculator is that I guarantee you when they were having conversations, people were saying, how dare you use this machine? You can’t trust this machine. You’re cheating. You should be doing this math on paper in front of people. Gee, does that sound familiar? That you can’t trust this thing. In fact, what was funny is that the calculator was invented in 1773. But it wasn’t demonstrated for five years because the people who invented it had to get over the fact that people thought it was untrustworthy. They had to prove it worked. And so it’s like, it sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? And then the one on the right is a picture of a stock photo of a dude putting a piece of beef in a microwave oven. And I remember hearing years ago that among the sort of chefs of old, they thought using a microwave oven was cheating. You shouldn’t be using a microwave oven to do whatever. That’s unnatural and it’s just not acceptable. And it’s like, here again, another technology that initially was dismissed as cheating or a shortcut that you shouldn’t be using, it sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?

Brian: It’s really about making jobs more efficient. But here’s what’s interesting, Andy. I think it’s ties in my earlier point about intentions.. Did you know that more than one in three Americans earned money through side hustles and 32% think they’ll always want or need those? So is the intention of using AI? Does it tie back to, hey, I’m going to have two or three full-time jobs or a side hustle enables me to game my employer’s situation and have multiple jobs at once. In some cases, then I think maybe employers have a beef with using it and people should probably be hiding it.

Andy: I think you found some numbers that said, it’s like almost 50% of those age 27 to 42. So younger people, half of them have side hustles. I guess companies have to get better at recognizing that, but if somebody’s generating value, the question is, do you need that person to generate value or do you just need the chatGPT that they’re using to do it on its own? I mean, are you overpaying people to basically use chatGPT and as a result, they’re able to work in multiple jobs. This will work itself out over time, but it’s really an admission that companies don’t know a lot about what their employees are actually doing and how they’re actually doing it. I would argue who cares. But you could be saving money, I guess, but I think there’s a point about trust. There’s just some, there are some companies that feel like we need to know how they did this and where it came from and not for verification purposes, for origination purposes. Are we paying somebody to do this? Or are they getting this from somebody else? I say who cares, right?

Brian: I think ultimately what’s winning is the outcome economy, meaning hey I need an outcome here and this ties into the remote versus hybrid versus in office discussion, because what’s driving a lot of the in-office stuff companies say “it’s cultural” and there’s some weight to that, but ultimately managers are still uncomfortable with the fact that they don’t know what their employees are doing if they’re not in the office. So I think this ties into it too, right? And so, if you think about you sitting in the office using AI to do your tasks and your manager looking over your shoulder, that’s a little different than doing it from home and trying to run five jobs at once. 88% again, another stat here, 88% of Gen Z use AI to do their jobs for them. Gen Z, this is the youngest group. 88%.

Andy: Well, and we found this idea that there’s something called “task paralysis,” which is I don’t know what to do next. So they go to AI and ask AI. This is otherwise known as thinking. Brian, I need you to finish this project. Oops, task paralysis. I don’t know how to do that.

Brian: So we asked our LinkedIn universe here, our community on LinkedIn. If you are using AI in your work, are you hiding it? Are you being transparent? And in our LinkedIn world, 82% said they’re being transparent about it. So either they’re lying to us through the LinkedIn poll, which maybe they are, or there is some hope here that people are willing to be transparent and maybe even help their organization become more efficient by using AI.

Andy: I have a theory on this one too. Our people tend to be even more senior versus more junior. The senior people organization have no reason to hide it, because their jobs are not threatened. Nobody’s going to question the CEO. Are you doing the work? Or is AI doing the work? But junior people are the ones who I think are more concerned about this, because I think they feel like their jobs are competing with AI. Senior executives are not competing with AI yet. So that might explain this one. Maybe if it was a more junior audience, we get slightly different results.