📥 Your Future of Work Digest #11

Welcome to this week’s edition! 👋

This week we’ll cover a news roundup of:

• 📊 2023 AI Consumer Usage Report - What are people actually using, and how often?

• 🛠️ Jobseeker AI Tools Roundup - More than interviews: What parts of the process are being impacted by AI?

• 💼 Linkedin: Recruiter and Learning new features

• 🤖 AI Impact on specific tasks and Skills Matrix

• 👥 Peer Reviews - is AI able to match humans?

• 🔧 Other Trending tools

2023 AI Consumer Usage Report

Timely and very insightful report by A16z on how actually people are using AI as of today.

80% of the companies in this list, didn’t exist 1 year ago. Crazy, right?

But what are they used for?

• Obviously, the #1 category right now is the ‘General Asistant’ (i.e. ChatGPT) but two other categories have started to drive significant usage in recent months—AI companions (such as CharacterAI) and content generation tools (such as Midjourney and ElevenLabs). Within the broader content generation category, image generation is the top use case with 41% of traffic, followed by prosumer writing tools at 26%, and video generation at 8%.

• We’re also starting to see significant fragmentation. Products that are purpose-built for specific use cases or workflows are growing alongside more generalist tools, and showing signs that they can also become successful companies.

Coming from a marketing background, this is another interesting stat. Basically, the average Generative-AI company right now is getting most of their traffic from ‘organic’ sources (referral, word of mouth, organic Social Media) which means they don’t need to rely on heavy marketing budgets like ‘traditional’ companies.

Of course this is driven by the current hype, and is destined to change, especially with the fragmentation and continuing spur of new projects that are being founded every day.

Jobseeker AI Tools Roundup

Great infographic by CVWallet on Jobseeker Adoption of AI.

TLDR; In the near future, most job seekers are likely to use this technology. This could lead to a significant increase in job applications, with each one closely matching the job requirements - but making a lot of applications to be very similar. This will add concerns about data accuracy and its potential impact on trust in the process. At an industry level, suppliers may face challenges due to these changes, and it’s clear that many organizations currently lack a clear plan to address them.

The #1 tool is now CV and resume building (KickResume, Resumaker.ai etc) with close second ‘Tailored search’, i.e. help in making sense of the job opportunities. Massive / automatic applications are especially used by entry-level candidates for interships (think about Simplify.jobs) and last there’s interview questions and career advice (which we just did a focus on in the last issue “3 Steps to Transform Interviews”)

Linkedin: Recruiter and Learning with AI

LinkedIn is also joining the party and recently introduced advanced generative AI features in its Recruiter and Learning platforms.

Recruiter 2024 is basically an AI assitant for sourcing better through the platform, making the filtering and manual searching less painful, while adding message automations and so on.

LinkedIn Learning, aimed at individuals (but through company paid plans) introduced a chatbot experience that offers both real-time advice and tailored content recommendations all personalized based on job title, career goal, and the skills. Currently, it's still in beta, but you can see a preview here:

Can this really be effective and go in depth? This is the main question we need to pose ourselves, being able to assess critically everything we see and not just look at the ‘shiny objects’.

This also made me think about the broader picture. Does this ring a bell for ChatGPT’s ‘death’?

Despite its impressive capabilities, its prominence may wane with the rise of embedded AI solutions in frequently-used tools. Integrated AI provides users with direct and seamless assistance, reducing the appeal of external platforms like ChatGPT. With extensive datasets at their disposal, major companies like LinkedIn and Google could potentially develop AI functionalities that match or even surpass what ChatGPT offers.

Yes, more data on AI-Impact…and Skills Matrix

It’s becoming a little bit of a nuisance to keep hearing every day about the impact of AI. That said, we’re starting to turn our heads towards a bit more concrete numbers than magnificent very generic percentages, much like the one below that estimates potential time-savings for a variety of tasks like language translation, text analysis and more creative / complex ones like ‘idea generation’ and ‘code debugging’.

Another interesting chart I found this week is simple, but one that I would expect to be coming up in many powerpoints around the world (especially for 2024): a Skill matrix. By deconstructing the different roles by type of activities and technologies involved, this is the first step to a) have a correct mapping of who’s doing what (think about: job rotation, upskilling, etc (I recommend going back to my article on ‘Role vs Skills - which provided also a super interesting academic research on the topic) b) understand if there is potential for introducing AI and therefore for impact.

Can ChatGPT do Academic Peer-Reviews?

A recent study from Stanford students tried to get ChatGPT to see how well it could do ‘peer-reviews’ versus humans. Results: not surprisingly, it’s fast and can help with editing, small comments, but is often too generic and lacks depth. Let’s always have in mind that we’re talking about a ‘word-prediction’ software at the end of the day, and that this will lack by default of innovation/critical thinking, and most of all will be as good as the data it has. So it should have very topic-specific instances to run on, and be always more integrated with humans-in-the-loop versus being seen as a complete substitute/oracle.

Trending Tools

💬 TalkNotes- Turn your thoughts into actionable notes, fast (link)

🗣️ Chatcare- Reduce your customer support volume by 60% (link)

🧾 Airparser- Data extraction powered by GPT-4 (link)

🪄 Framer AI- Generate a website in minutes from prompts (link)

⚡️ Notion AI- Your notes, on steroids. Access the limitless power of AI, right inside Notion (link)

📱 Synthesia- Create professional videos without mics, cameras, or actors using an AI-generated character (link)