Major market study

Artificial intelligence: every 3rd person fears for their job

How will the use of AI change our lives? At work as well as at home?

(Bild: stock.adobe.com)

Artificial intelligence is finding its way into companies, but there is still room for improvement in terms of knowledge. This is the result of a market study commissioned by the state of Upper Austria and the Upper Austrian Chamber of Labor. The conclusion: there are plenty of unanswered questions, but there is no doubt that the use and importance of AI will increase significantly.

market drew up a questionnaire based on interviews with experts and asked 167 companies and 197 works councils about their views on AI. According to Birgit Starmayr from market, the mix of respondents is not entirely representative of the Upper Austrian economy, but includes production as well as trade, commerce and services, and the creative industries are also represented. EPUs and companies with fewer than five employees were not surveyed.

Personal knowledge of AI was "virtually non-existent", Starmayr summarized. Only 27% of company representatives and 12% of works councils would describe their level of information as good - although people usually tend to overestimate themselves in such self-assessments, the opinion researcher added.

35 percent of employees are afraid of losing their job
The majority of employers (89 percent) and employees (60 percent) agree that AI has the potential to support workers, but that there is a need to build awareness of how it is trained (employers 80 percent, works councils 75 percent) and that greater importance must be attached to data protection (employers 75 percent, works councils 81 percent). 17% of companies fear that many people will lose their jobs due to the use of AI; this percentage is naturally much higher among works councils, at 35%. However, compared to the other responses, the fear of losing a job was "absolutely not a core issue", according to Starmayr, "the positive clearly outweighs the negative".

The fact that the use of AI is still in its infancy in many companies is shown by the fact that only 12% of employers and 9% of works councils said that it already plays a major or very major role in their companies. However, 72% of company representatives and 57% of employee representatives expect this to be the case in the future. While managers tend to see the potential, employees are more concerned about issues such as data protection and security.

Even if the expectations of the social partners point in a similar direction despite the different focus due to their roles, there is a very different view when asked for an overall assessment: 62% of companies expect the opportunities to outweigh the risks, while the works councils are much more skeptical and only 25% of them agree with this statement.

Upper AustrianAK President Andreas Stangl emphasized that the study is "a real reality check", as the questions were broken down to the respective company level. "Knowledge about AI is still very limited," concluded Markus Achleitner (ÖVP), the provincial councillor for economic affairs, from the results. However, as many companies are already using AI, there is a certain discrepancy here. He therefore sees a "huge need for training".