Confirm CEO Josh Merrill was quoted in OnLabor in a piece examining Goldman Sachs' high-profile report estimating that AI could automate 25% of tasks in the US economy — and what that means for how we think about workplace productivity and human-AI collaboration.
The Goldman Sachs report, released in early 2023, generated enormous discussion about AI's economic impact. OnLabor, which covers the intersection of labor, technology, and policy, sought out perspectives from HR technology leaders on what the report means in practice for organizations thinking about how to integrate AI tools.
Josh Merrill's perspective, reflected in the piece, centers on a principle that guides Confirm's product development: AI tools in the workplace should be assistive, with humans still producing the end product. This isn't just a values statement — it's a practical framework for evaluating which AI applications are likely to succeed versus which ones create new problems while appearing to solve old ones.
Assistive AI reduces cognitive load. It surfaces information that humans would miss. It does the synthesis work so humans can focus on the judgment work. In the context of performance management, this means AI that drafts review summaries from peer feedback, flags rating distributions that look anomalous, and identifies patterns in collaboration data — so that human managers can make better decisions, not so that decisions happen without them.
The Goldman Sachs productivity estimates are significant, but the path to realizing that productivity depends on how organizations deploy AI. The companies that treat AI as an augmentation tool for human judgment will likely outperform those treating it as a replacement — particularly in areas like talent management where the stakes of poor decisions are high and the contexts are deeply human.
Read the full article: Goldman Sachs Estimates Productivity Gains from Workplace AI — OnLabor
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