Does AI Make Your Team Lazy? Breaking Down Fact from Fiction

It’s been just over a year since ChatGPT came on the scene and conversation about it hasn’t exactly abated.

You’ll hear about it at work, at home, on the news, on your feed. 

You’re likely seeing it seep into your daily work as well. It feels like every app has a magic AI button.

You might find you’re getting more work done because of AI. But there is growing skepticism around this fact.

Are you really getting more done, or are you beginning to rely on technology to the point that you can’t accomplish the task by yourself anymore? More importantly, are those sharp skills you’ve developed over years going to atrophy because you’re relying on AI too much?

We hear this debate often and in this article, we’ll tackle this tough question and discuss the following:

• Skill Atrophy
• AI Increases Productivity In The Workplace And At Home
• Using AI To Be More Productive
• Summing It Up: Does AI Make You Lazy?

Skill Atrophy

AI has begun taking over certain tasks in the workplace, creating concerns amongst professionals that AI has the potential to make them less creative and actually reduce dependency on skill sets you’ve refined over time. 

This is especially true in marketing departments, where employees must have a vast knowledge of a business’s human customer base as well as a creative side that helps to build effective marketing campaigns. 

In fact, about 31% of marketers worry that increased reliance on AI will make them lazy at their jobs, since it takes away from the human touch of doing their work.

It’s a matter of semantics, but AI skeptics often equate laziness with complacency and a lack of critical thinking. 

For instance, they might feel that you will lose your motivation because you are no longer required to complete a task end to end. Or you may not be able to do the sort of deep work required in day-to-day decision-making because AI is readily available to feed you ideas and solutions.

The same study mentioned above found that 63% of operations workers worry that AI will not be able to improve productivity, and some of them believe that AI may even reduce productivity. Many workers are skeptical of the fact that AI takes over repetitive tasks and makes decisions for you, which they believe will lead to laziness and a lack of complete knowledge of your role.

Fortunately, many studies have shown that the fears aren’t as warranted as they first appear. 

AI Increases Productivity In The Workplace And At Home

AI is actually increasing productivity in the workplace. The Nielsen Norman Group conducted three different case studies to show the effects of AI. It found that employee productivity increased on an average of 66% by using Generative AI tools like Regie.aI.

Productivity relates to the number of outputs produced per input. For example, a desk worker might measure their productivity by how many documents they can fill out per hour. If AI helps that worker fill out more documents per hour, the employee is becoming more efficient and more productive. 

If you used to be able to craft 10 personalization emails, between researching your buyer, linking personalized data to a relevant value prop, and sending the email, in one hour, using AI to streamline the workflow, you can now do 60.

While some skeptics might still twist this as laziness, the truth is that the employee is still doing the work while AI is simply assisting and helping them do their job more effectively. 

To use a sales person as an example, by reducing the amount of time spent on these tedious, administrative tasks (see: logging notes in CRM, knowing when to follow up with a prospect, sending out emails), sales professionals can actually spend more time on using the skills that make them top notch. That includes listening more deeply during a conversation rather than taking notes. Speeding up research so you understand more about a prospects needs before you’ve even gotten on a call. The list goes on.

Using AI To Be More Productive

Instead of viewing AI as a replacement for human labor and thought processes, try switching up your viewpoint to include the benefits of humans and technology working together. Think of AI as your teammate rather than a replacement for you, as the human - tech partnership has evolved over time, especially in the sales space:

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Consider the following ways that AI helps you focus on using and improving your skills more.

Automation And Delegation

Everyone has repetitive tasks that they complete on a day-to-day basis that are just taking up time that could be used on more rewarding projects. AI can automate repetitive tasks so that you can prioritize those that are contributing more toward your goals. 

For example, AI can be used to automate top of funnel prospecting activities for sales development representatives and sales reps. Monotonous tasks such as lead list building, and message creation, can now be handled by Generative AI, giving SDRs and reps time back to focus on higher value touches like phone calls and social messages. 

With recent reports showing that sales reps are still only selling about 28% of the time, we shouldn’t be worried about their sales skills atrophying without AI. Instead we can reduce the amount of time completing basic tasks, and have more time to focus on the harder but more important parts of our to-do lists.

Insights from data

Businesses have terabytes and terabytes of data. But that data is useless without insights and those insights are useless without a team member there to take action. AI can help your team sift through a tremendous amount of data at once to get more thorough insights quicker. 

The result? Your sales team can spend more time going after accounts and prospects that have the highest likelihood of needing the solution or product you’re offering. Instead of trying to have  a sales conversation with an NFL stadium, you’re instead having a conversation at a dinner table which brings us to our last point. 

AI can be a massive help in personalizing products and services, as well as communications, to suit customer preferences. This not only helps to free up your sales team to connect with customers, but it also can help to improve overall buyer sentiment and conversion rates.

Collaboration And Communication

Another concern is that generative AI platforms will make sales people worse at communicating absent any tools. The reality is quite the opposite. AI as it exists today is not designed (and honestly, can’t) replace human interaction. Instead, it enhances it. In the realm of communication and collaboration, AI can be a powerful tool for sales professionals.

For instance, AI can actually help you stay at inbox zero (imagine that). It can help organize and prioritize messages, ensuring that important emails or notifications don't get lost in a crowded inbox. This means salespeople can spend less time managing their inbox and more time focusing on high-value tasks, such as closing deals or nurturing leads.

Moreover, AI can integrate chatbots into support systems, providing immediate responses to customer queries. This leaves salespeople free to focus on more complex issues, deepening their expertise and skill set.

Finally, AI can analyze conversations to suggest tasks or actions, making salespeople's work even more efficient. This allows them to concentrate on strategic tasks, like developing personalized sales strategies, instead of getting bogged down in administrative tasks.

In essence, AI tools are not a threat but an ally. They streamline and automate routine tasks, allowing salespeople to focus on what they do best: connecting with customers, understanding their needs, and providing value. So, far from causing skills to atrophy, AI can actually enhance and refine them, making salespeople more effective and successful in their roles.

Summing It Up: Does AI Make You Lazy?

AI can undoubtedly eliminate the need to perform everyday repetitive tasks. While some AI skeptics may view this as the onset of extreme human laziness, we believe that AI is helping us to achieve the exact opposite — extreme productivity and meaningful lift for business. 

Instead of dealing with the endless list of tedious duties, humans can instead spend time on the more complex parts of their days that actually require more critical thinking, and higher degrees of knowledge and creativity.

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