Slack is taking a cue from BuzzFeed with a new personality quiz that aims to understand how modern office workers use AI.

In a survey of 5,000 full-time desk workers across six countries, the Salesforce-owned office chat platform sorts workers into five broad buckets depending on their usage of and sentiment toward generative AI tools in the workplace.

From “The Rebel” to “The Maximalist,” the company claims this classification system will help business leaders better organize teams to use AI effectively. (Want to see where you fall on the spectrum? Take the quiz.)

“[The personas] are a reflection of the different ways that employees are using and not using AI, as well as an understanding of the variety of emotions and experiences that people are having surrounding AI at work,” Christina Janzer, Slack’s SVP of research and analytics, said in a press briefing. “We really wanted to recognize that there is no one-size-fits all approach when it comes to your experience with AI.”

Keep reading here.—PK

When young people aren’t tapping AI on the job, they’re using it to reel in extra income on the side.

That’s the takeaway of an Edelman report commissioned by Samsung that found that about 73% of around 2,000 Zoomers with side jobs surveyed across five countries were using AI in the course of those extra-occupational pursuits. The top three types of tasks include summarizing long documents or meeting notes, conducting research, and developing new written and visual content.

A separate Morgan Stanley report last year predicted that side hustles—or “multi-earning”—could balloon into a $1.4 trillion market by 2030, with generative AI being responsible for $300 billion of that figure, per the report’s most bullish scenario. Meanwhile, searches for AI-related gig work have flooded freelance platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, as longtime traditional freelancers have reportedly lost work opportunities.

Meet the moonlighters: The Samsung report divided side hustlers into three major categories. The biggest archetype is the “AI super user,” with 48% of respondents. These Zoomers, who skew toward the older end of the age bracket (between ages 25 and 27), tend to use AI across multiple tasks from content creation to web development.

Keep reading here.—PK

Tired of waiting for that so-called productivity app to reload? According to a survey by TRG Datacenters, Monday.com, Gmail, and Microsoft Teams saw the most service disruptions over the last year, followed by Slack, Outlook, and Google Drive.

The study, which analyzed the performance of the 30 top work-related platforms, found that such outages had far-ranging impacts.

• Outlook logged the “longest major crashes,” lasting an average of five hours each.
• Gmail disruptions reached 1.8 billion users across the world—or more than 20% of the global population.

Those disconnects may add up as corporate America outsources critical internal functions to third-party applications. CIO Dive reported that as of May 2023, “the average desk worker uses 11 applications to complete their tasks, up from just six in 2019,” according to a survey of nearly 5,000 employees.

Keep reading here.—KG