TL;DR

Anthropic has launched an AI-powered interview tool that conducted 1,250 detailed interviews with professionals about their AI usage. The findings reveal widespread optimism about AI’s role at work, but also highlight significant trust barriers and concerns about professional identity.

Key Findings by Sector

General workforce respondents want to preserve tasks that define their professional identity while delegating routine work to AI. They envision futures where their role shifts to overseeing AI systems. One office assistant compared AI to the typewriter: “computers didn’t get rid of mathematicians, they just made them able to do more.”

Creative professionals are using AI to increase productivity despite peer judgement and anxiety about their future. A social media manager reported being “less stressed” thanks to efficiency gains, while a fiction writer noted that AI novels lack “the deeper nuances that only a human can weave throughout the story.”

Scientists uniformly expressed desire for AI that could generate hypotheses and design experiments, but confined actual use to peripheral tasks like manuscript writing and debugging code. One economist explained: “I just can’t rely on it not hallucinating, or to put it bluntly, lying.”

How the Tool Works

Anthropic Interviewer, powered by Claude, runs detailed interviews automatically at scale, feeding results back to human researchers for analysis. The company is publicly releasing all interview data for other researchers to explore.

Looking Forward

Starting now, Claude.ai users may see pop-ups inviting them to participate in the next research phase. For UK businesses, the study offers valuable insights: AI adoption succeeds when it respects professional identity and automates the mundane whilst keeping humans in control of meaningful decisions.

Source: Anthropic