83% of Indians are willing to delegate work to AI, says Microsoft’s report
Microsoft has recently released the India findings of Work Trend Index 2023 report, “Will AI Fix Work?” As per the company, the 2023 Work Trend Index surveyed 31,000 people across industries in 31 countries including 14 Asia Pacific markets as well as trillions of signals from emails, meetings and chats across Microsoft 365, plus labor trends on LinkedIn.
As per the report, 76% of Indian workers say they don’t have enough time and energy to get their work done, and those people are 3.1x more likely to say they struggled with being innovative. Within Microsoft 365, the average person spends 57% of their time communicating, and only 43% creating.
The report also highlighted that 78% of Indian workers agree that they lack uninterrupted focus during their workday. More than 3 in 4 Indian leaders (84%) say they are concerned about lack of innovation. The primary culprit disrupting productivity is inefficient meetings, as reported by 46% of Indian workers who feel that their absence in half or more of their meetings would go unnoticed by colleagues, the report cited.
Speaking on the findings of the report, Bhaskar Basu, country head – modern work, Microsoft India, said, “As the nature of work evolves, AI promises to be the biggest transformation to work in our lifetimes. The next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth, removing the drudgery from our jobs and freeing us to rediscover the joy of creation.”
While 74% of Indian workers say they are worried AI will replace their jobs, more than 83% would delegate as much work as possible to AI in order to lessen their workloads. Over 3 in 4 Indian workers would be comfortable using AI not just for administrative tasks (86%) but also for analytical work (88%), and even creative aspects of their role (87%).
100% of Indian creative workers who are extremely familiar with AI would be comfortable using AI for creative aspects of their job. Meanwhile, Indian managers are 1.6x more likely to say that AI would provide value in the workplace by boosting productivity rather than cutting headcount, the report stated.
Additionally, the data shows that the pace of work has accelerated faster than humans is impacting innovation. AI is poised to create a whole new way of working and organisations that move first to embrace AI will break the cycle — increasing creativity and productivity for everyone.
To conclude, the report iterated the need for competency in every employee, and not just AI experts, including prompt engineering in their day-to-day. According to the report, 90% of Indian leaders say employees they hire will need new skills to be prepared for the growth of AI. While 78% of Indian workers say they don’t currently have the right capabilities to get their work done.