[rukshn]

I’m now responsible for improving AI literacy in the organization I work.

But the people in charge just want the employees to just answer some questions so they can handover Claude or Chat GPT licenses so they can show people are using AI to improve productivity.

There are people who don’t know when to use AI and when not to use Ai and think they can just Claude their way through everything. I wanted to change that but when the whole idea is to just increase AI use I guess they don’t care about how AI is used.

[ffsm8]

I was on a quarter demo the other day and the project lead for ai innovation was talking about the things he's preparing for the company.

I will not address the things he pitched (as coming soon), as I'm a developer and (hopefully) not the target audience, but I was quiet surprised when they made a questioneer asking how many people use ai and how frequently. (The target demographic was middle management, product owners etc)

75% of people answering said they're using it daily and considered it an essential tool they need to work

Considering it was anonymous I was expecting lower numbers, honestly.

[overfeed]

> Considering it was anonymous

In the recent past, my department received an email from on high with a list of people who were yet to complete the "anonymous" survey.

I always assume my work-survey answers are traceable back to me, whether it's via self-doxxing with my answers, tracing links of the rootkit-level MDM software that can record my screen, but they pinky-promise to only use for remote assistance, in case I open a ticket with IT.

[andy99]

Talked to someone at a large company who had admin access to survey results (require to do some analytics). The survey was “anonymous” but results were geo-located, and had some information about the team they came from, which in many cases was enough to clearly identify people. There is a difference between “doesn’t have a persons name on it” anonymous and actually anonymized in a way hardened against figuring out who is who. I don’t think anyone really does the latter.

[jpc0]

You do know it is possible for the answers to be anonymous but who submitted to be tracked?

[iinnPP]

Depends on how it's done.

Trusting that process to be done well is probably not the greatest plan.

[HumblyTossed]

I have taken some really badly (on purpose?) written questionnaires in the past. Asking about team size, role, etc.

That’s not anonymous at that point. That’s an agenda.

[overfeed]

I've seen questions asking for my org, team size, role, and when I joined, and thought it would have saved me time had they asked for my employee number instead.

[close04]

Most external survey providers claimed anonymity but in their T&Cs stated in a very roundabout way that they could provide some information to customers for quality purposes or something. Read “we’ll deanonymize some users if the paying customer wants it”. Internal survey tools are subject to internal management pressure.

Even when you use a tool like Microsoft Forms, where MS really can’t be bothered to deanonimize users unless 3 letter agencies get involved, it’s still possible to do timestamp matching between the proxy/VPN logs and the submission time.

Asume real anonymity only if the URL is the same for everyone and you can fill the survey from any computer on the internet.

But the explanation for why people overhype AI usage is probably simpler. They want to keep their license because it’s a nice perk. They’ll use it to get the gist of a long email thread without bothering the read the details, to get some meeting minutes without validating if that was actually what was said, to generate some crappy modern equivalent of wordart graphics for their presentations, and feel like the time saved to generate what most time is slop was worth it.

When I worked on this (outside of coding) it was a pain to find a use case that really benefited. These were all niche uses that fit an LLM like a glove. These rest was slop, I could see the usage reports, and the BS self reporting surveys. Everyone inflated the numbers and usage to justify keeping their license.

[DrewADesign]

You do know it’s possible for insecure leaders to lie about things like that, and that there’s no possible way to definitively tell beforehand?

[Survey8430]

This guy is wrong.

[hennell]

It's perfectly possible. Two tables, one stores answer responses only, the other just marks off who has responded. No link between them and you have anonymous data but can tell who hasn't responded.

Of course if you record created/updated timestamps on both, insert both records in the same order, accidently record the user code in the response data, take backups in between responses, have identifying questions or just don't have that many people responding it's easy/not hard to reverse engineer.

But it's quite possible to do right, I did it quite effectively almost by mistake years ago. Sent a customer survey out with generated codes as identifiers recorded with answers. Before sending reminder emails a script grabbed the codes, marked the customer as responded and wiped the code (so I could just get future responses where code was not null to mark next people off). Although I had timestamps the script meant customers were updated in blocks, there really wasn't any data to link them.

I know because the Boss was not happy he couldn't find out which customer had said what, and I had to point out all the communication (with customers and me) called it an anonymous survey, so why would I have saved them?

So it is possible, just not easy even if you intend it, and it's often not intentional...

I don't trust anonymous surveys either now...

[Survey8430]

The way I see it:

If the participant has to trust the survey creator, then it is not anonymous. The survey creator can link the data.

If the survey creator has to trust the participant, the survey is anonymous. The participant can lie in the survey, lie about participating, or submit the survey multiple times.

Your example was not anonymous. But you did not break the participant's trust, thank you! (Or maybe you are lying.)

Anonymous example: Sending a clean link to people to take the survey. If not enough answers have been received, a reminder can be sent to all, with a clause, that says: "if you have already done it, you can ignore the reminder."

[HumblyTossed]

The pressure to use AI is worse than the pressure kids get to use drugs. It’s insane.

The job market right now sucks so everyone is really just trying to not be the next cut.

[kakacik]

Never expect anonymous voting/quizz/whatever to be fully anonymous in big corporations, if its something about touchy topics and/or can affect employment/performance of given person results will be skewed. If metric becomes the target it ceases to be a good metric and all that.

It all rest on the shoulders of responsible manager(s) on how moral they are. Many are not.

[ravenical]

If it's 75% exactly, that's consistent with them asking four people

[ffsm8]

It wasn't, and it was visibly updating while people were submitting their answers. I just rounded it as I don't remember the exact number at the time they closed the submission.

Could still be faked ofc, but I don't think they did.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> 75% of people answering said they're using it daily and considered it an essential tool they need to work

> (The target demographic was middle management, product owners etc)

This leaves a fairly wide set of options for what "essential" entails.

Do 75% of middle management and product owners actually need AI for their job? Seems unlikely.

Do 75% of middle management and product owners use AI to slop up emails, meeting "summaries", and reports? That's quite possible. Would they declare it to be an "essential tool"? One imagines they are not too fond of actually doing meaningful work.

It's quite easy to get high percentages like this when the AI is involved in make-work and the costs are low if not zero. The moment inference costs go up, most of this usage will evaporate.

[Tesl]

Most of the answers to your post are reasons this 75% must be fake / lies or whatever.

But maybe the simplest answer is that most people do use the tools daily now and consider them essential...?

As much as HN would hate to think that

[smeggysmeg]

The leaders who mandate AI have no understanding on how to actually use it for productivity. They use it like a Magic 8-Ball to confirm whatever ignorance they have and believe the hype that it can do anything.

[SoftTalker]

They have always done this. These are the same managers who ask subordinates for reports that support their predetermined agendas, or higher level execs who hire consultants for the same purpose.

[throwaway894345]

I agree with you, but also it’s not entirely unreasonable to just use AI (or any other tool) and let them figure out over time what are and aren’t good uses. This approach requires an ability to see past the next quarterly earnings report, which is a rare quality for a business, but it can be healthy. The long term result is likely to be a culture that is more AI literate than they would be if they had top down instruction. The optimal path is probably a bit of both, but if I had to pick a ditch it would be “trust my employees”.

The thing I have a real issue with, and which seems more common, is the belief that they can cut raises because AI will make them more productive. In that case, the best employees (read: those most capable of leveraging AI effectively) will leave to find better paying work and the remainder will be too busy with the additional workload to have time to figure out how to use AI to make themselves more efficient.

[liveoneggs]

Just have IT roll out OpenClaw to everyone, connect it up to their emails, chats, password managers, etc and then click "go".

Why not?

[RobotToaster]

Definitely start with the executives, you can't leave them out of such a useful tool. :)

[somewhatgoated]

Not that there would be any ill effects from this, executives sit mostly in meetings, they don’t really do anything much besides that; maybe occasionally write a short email. They also don’t have access to critical systems.

It’s much more of an issue with devs

[xyst]

So my electricity bills are rising just so corporate idiots can increase an internal metric.

Fuck all of this.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Almost every bad thing happening in the world is so corporate idiots can increase some internal metric.