Accenture executive says AI can speed up work, but won’t raise productivity unless…

Ramine Tinati

, lead at

Accenture

, APAC Center for Advanced AI recently said that artificial intelligence (AI) tools may help people finish tasks faster, but they don’t automatically make workers more productive unless companies rethink how work is done. Speaking at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI Singapore conference recently, Tinati said “If you give employees a tool to do things faster, they do it faster. But are they more productive? Probably not, because they do it faster and then go for coffee breaks”. According to the Accenture executive, speeding up existing tasks isn’t enough. Real productivity improvements, he said, require companies to redesign their workflows completely. He also noted that some Asian companies are falling behind in AI use “because they don’t think about reinventing the work.”His comments come at a time when major companies are investing heavily in generative AI. Amazon has committed over $100 billion to AI investments, while Microsoft has invested $80 billion into AI data centers—even as it cut multiple jobs this year. However, not all experts see AI as a threat. Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed a MIT research suggesting artificial intelligence diminishes cognitive abilities, arguing instead that his daily AI use has actually enhanced his thinking skills. Speaking on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" that aired on July 13, Huang said he uses AI "literally every single day" and believes his "cognitive skills are actually advancing."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared an X (formerly Twitter) post stating that he agrees with lots of what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said about AI and jobs. He believes that jobs will be very different from what they are now, but will still be meaningful. “Agree with lots of what Jensen has been saying about ai and jobs; there is a ton of stuff to do in the world,” Altman wrote in the post. He continued “for sure jobs will be very different, and maybe the jobs of the future will look like playing games to us today while still being very meaningful to those people of the future. (people of the past might say that about us)”.