Gen Z leads workplace AI adoption with demand for mobile and email tools

The news: Nearly all Gen Zers are using AI heavily at work, especially for writing emails and tackling language barriers.

• 93% of Gen Z employees and 79% of millennials are using two or more AI tools at work on a weekly basis, per a Google Workplace survey conducted by The Harris Poll.
• Nearly every respondent (98%) expects AI to affect their industry in the next five years, and 75% have recommended generative AI (genAI) tools to their coworkers.

AI in motion: Mobile AI tools are a rising focus for developers and phone manufacturers, and that access is proving important to US workers.

• 87% of The Harris Poll respondents said that AI makes them more comfortable with writing long emails on their phones.
• 90% are more confident joining meetings on the go if they have AI taking notes for them, underlining AI’s usefulness in hybrid workforces.

Zooming out: The pool of genAI users is still growing, albeit at a slower rate than during the tech’s big boom in late 2022 and 2023. While we expect 2024 to end with 51.5% YoY growth in at-work genAI users, we forecast that growth to drop to 21.2% by 2026.

Although employees are hopping on the genAI train en masse, business leaders are more subdued: Only 66% of CEOs and 16% of CTOs are confident that their teams are ready to implement genAI, per IBM.

The opportunity: AI companies are responding to interest in tools to expedite workflow and streamline tasks by creating customizable GPTs and more capable small language models (SLMs).

• Last week, Anthropic updated its Claude chatbot to include personalized model response options. Users can now ask Claude to reply in formal, concise, or explanatory tones, or they can provide samples of their own writing for the chatbot to match their personal tone.
• Adobe researchers developed an SLM capable of running queries entirely on-device, increasing its use for employees in data-sensitive industries such as healthcare or legal.

Key takeaway: Workers’ exploding interest in genAI tools provides a substantial market for companies to develop models that can be fine-tuned for individual workflows.

Employers should act quickly to ensure that they offer clear policies for workers on how AI can be used to avoid data privacy or copyright issues.

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