Exploring New Frontiers: An Overview

A new report based on a research study by MBO Partners and Emergent Research hit the internet today. “Exploring New Frontiers: How Independent Workers View and Use Generative AI in 2024” looks at how independents interact with Gen AI in their businesses. Our research, which included 1,132 independent workers and 3,832 traditional workers, indicates that most independents are incorporating Gen AI into their work. This is good news for enterprises with independent workforces.

Busting the Myth of Job Loss

In spite of the media’s stoking of fears about AI, only a small percentage of independent workers (8%) are concerned about Gen AI replacing them with clients within the next five years, with 16% voicing their concerns over a longer time frame. For comparison, 13% of traditional workers are worried about being replaced by Gen AI within five years and 21% expressed concern in the “more than five years” bracket.

The main reason most independents don’t fear Gen AI is that they believe it can’t replace important parts of their work—for example, customer interaction, insight generation, and creativity. They also cite limitations of Gen AI such as a lack of common sense in responses, data mistakes, and transparency around how responses are generated.

Putting Gen AI to Work

Just over half (51%) of independents surveyed find Gen AI extremely useful to very useful, with another 34% considering it somewhat useful. They report that using Gen AI increases productivity and saves time, improving efficiency by 15% to 30%.

Respondents said that use of Gen AI spans a variety of functions including:

• Writing (39%) and research (34%), including fast topic research, article outline and draft generation, and deliverable formatting
• Creative content (32%), including original images and designs, that allow the independent to create high-quality creative material quickly and efficiently
• Marketing (27%), including content for presentations, websites, blogs, email campaigns, and social media as well as marketing-related data analysis Independent workers are using
• Administrative tasks (24%), including workflow automation, proposal preparation, and contract generation
• Coding and programming assistance (9%), including help with writing code, autocompleting partial code builds, and debugging

Making an Impact on Enterprises

Mastery of Gen AI by independent professionals is very good news for enterprises. As part of your workforce, they can be a vanguard that brings all workers forward by training them in using Gen AI in various roles. Leadership teams can call on them to weigh in on how to best incorporate Gen AI into workflows, to help identify the right Gen AI tools, and to be advisors as Gen AI policies are put in place.

As business owners, successful independent professionals must stay up to date on developments in the AI area. They also must master successive generations of AI tools. Enterprises can tap into this mastery and know-how by consulting with these independents to get their views on where AI is going and the tools continually becoming available to workers. This can help leadership put effective strategies in place that make best use of AI.