Here's what this says between the lines / in a roundabout fashion: --- LLM tools were sold to firms as game-changers. The truth is that they work, but by savi

Here's what this says between the lines / in a roundabout fashion: --- LLM tools were sold to firms as game-changers. The truth is that they work, but by saving bits of time and mental energy here and there. Those savings are meaningful in the aggregate and compound over time. But there are a few catches. First, most of the savings is realized by integrating the tools into workflows that are personal and often sui generis. That takes, on the one hand, know-how (but firms deployed the tools without clear direction and without training workers); and, on the other hand, time and effort (but many of the largely untrained workers aren't investing time and effort to do so, even if they have the know-how). Second, even where the training, time, and effort hurdles are cleared, the benefits inure primarily to the workers themselves: less time and mental energy spent doing what appear to be coordination tasks — ones that, so far, have been considered necessary but do not meaningfully represent the firm's actual value creation. For the benefits to inure to the firm (and thus appear on the radar of CEOs like those interviewed for the Fortune survey tangentially mentioned in TFA) the workers would need to "reinvest" the time and mental-energy savings in activities directly causing the value the firm is presumed to produce. They have little incentive to do so and they do not. Hence no increased firm productivity. And third, even where the "reinvest your new-found ease to benefit the firm" hurdle is overcome — here I'm visualizing Lumbergh's "Is This Good for the COMPANY?" banner — firms often have to trade their private data for those hard-won benefits. Thus the author arrives at his main conclusion: he will happily use "AI" (read: LLM tools) at work, on the company dime and with company data, to make his life easier, but he won't use the tools in his private life because he's privacy conscious. The other conclusion is that firms could theoretically derive benefits from LLM tools — but they haven't figured out that, in exchange for their own valuable data, over and above the monetary cost of the LLM tools, they need to train workers to use them; ensure workers use them, and properly; and ensure workers then do even more intensive work to drive the value creation the company is supposedly engaged in, instead of simply making their own lives easier. --- My personal conclusion is that people are going to start seeing even more clearly than before that most of what they and their colleagues do during most of their time is busy work that creates no actual value.