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Who's Adopting AI Agents--and What They're Actually Doing With Them (Harvard Business School. Mostly foolish uses.)
IMO they're mostly foolish uses, anyway. I'll explain.
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/whos-adopting-ai-agents-and-what-theyre-actually-doing-with-them
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To understand who’s currently using AI agents and how, Yang studied hundreds of millions of anonymized user interactions. His working paper, “The Adoption and Usage of AI Agents: Early Evidence from Perplexity” finds a clear pattern: The heaviest users tend to be knowledge workers, and they’re mostly using agents to boost productivity or assist with learning. Yang coauthored the paper, released in December, with a team from Perplexity that includes cofounders Johnny Ho and Denis Yarats; Jerry Ma, vice president of global affairs; data scientist Noah Yonack; and Kate Zyskowski, head of UX research.
-snip-
• Productivity. The largest category was related to productivity and workflow, accounting for 36% of total questions. This may include document and form editing, account management, email management, and spreadsheet and data editing.
• Learning tasks. Courses and research, encompassing tasks like watching class videos and summarizing key content, accounted for 21% of total queries.
-snip-
Much of the work was cognitively loaded, such as researching and summarizing key findings—less like an executive assistant and more like a research assistant, Yang says. “It’s like having a second brain and pair of hands,” he says.
-snip-
To understand who’s currently using AI agents and how, Yang studied hundreds of millions of anonymized user interactions. His working paper, “The Adoption and Usage of AI Agents: Early Evidence from Perplexity” finds a clear pattern: The heaviest users tend to be knowledge workers, and they’re mostly using agents to boost productivity or assist with learning. Yang coauthored the paper, released in December, with a team from Perplexity that includes cofounders Johnny Ho and Denis Yarats; Jerry Ma, vice president of global affairs; data scientist Noah Yonack; and Kate Zyskowski, head of UX research.
-snip-
• Productivity. The largest category was related to productivity and workflow, accounting for 36% of total questions. This may include document and form editing, account management, email management, and spreadsheet and data editing.
• Learning tasks. Courses and research, encompassing tasks like watching class videos and summarizing key content, accounted for 21% of total queries.
-snip-
Much of the work was cognitively loaded, such as researching and summarizing key findings—less like an executive assistant and more like a research assistant, Yang says. “It’s like having a second brain and pair of hands,” he says.
-snip-
Make that a hallucinating second brain, with a high error rate. And no one in their right mind would hire an executive assistant, let alone a research assistant, whose work has a high error rate and always needs to be checked because there's no way to predict when or where hallucinations/errors will show up. With a human assistant, if they make mistakes in a particular area but are pretty good otherwise, it becomes possible to predict which tasks should not be relegated to them...and ideally the human assistants will learn. With AI, it's always a crapshoot. And the failures will come with the bonus of a sycophantic chatbot apology, encouraging gullible human users to think the AI is actually learning, until the next time they screw something up.
But AI users have decided that's acceptable with AI. Heavy AI users have also been found to be the most likely users not to check AI results.
Which is how we end up with, for instance, academic, scientific and medical papers with fake quotes and citations that only made it to the final draft because the authors of those paper couldn't be bothered to check what the AI tool gave them.
The other main categories of AI-agent uses:
Media and entertainment, including viewing and posting to social media: 10%. I'd guess some of this is asking the AI to make recommendations. Welcome to mindless "more of the same" consumption, but the AI platform you're using and their advertisers will love you for it. You're the mindless consumer they're dreaming of, the perfect target for their ads. As for using AI for social media posts - anyone who does that should have a "might be AI" label slapped on all their posts automatically.
Travel and leisure: 7%. AI agent as travel agent. What could go wrong?
Career-related tasks: 7%. Let AI decide which jobs you should apply for and fill out the applications. Automating applications that in turn get automated reviews is already a huge problem, but think how quickly AI agents can add to it.
What's particularly disappointing about these findings - if they weren't hallucinated by AI - is that these are knowledge workers, people whose work is supposed to be valued because of their expertise and ability to think. By using AI, they're dumbing themselves down, both in terms of what they should know and how well they can think. They're not adding a second brain. They're outsourcing what should be their memory and cognitive ability to an AI tool that belongs to a corporation, a tool that might not always be available, and that might be hallucinating when it is.
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