Does AI save time? Executives say yes, employees say no.

Is your boss preaching the virtues of AI at work, while you don't actually find AI helps anywhere in your role? Turns out you are not alone.

A new study from AI consulting firm Section surveyed 5,000 white collar employees, and found a major disparity between workers and their managers when it came to AI and productivity.

In the study, 33 percent of company executives said using AI saved them 4 to 8 hours a week. Another 19 percent claimed that they saved more than 12 hours each week thanks to AI. Only 2 percent of executives said AI didn't save them any time at all.

But when it came to non-managerial employees, the sentiment around AI completely flipped.

A whopping 40 percent of workers said using AI in the workplace did not save them any time at all. Another 27 percent of workers said that AI usage saved them less than 2 hours per week, and only 2 percent of employees said AI saved them more than 12 hours each week.

Meanwhile another damning AI report, from software company Workday, suggests even those estimates are overblown. In Workday's survey, 85 percent of employees who said AI saved them time actually wasted that saved time correcting errors made by AI, notes the Wall Street Journal.

AI can certainly be a productivity tool for certain industries. The technology sector has most embraced AI, according to the study. Some software developers have been able to utilize AI to help speed up monotonous coding tasks, even at the risk of making vibe coding mistakes.

Other industries have not seen the same benefits, however. Retail was at the bottom of the list in Section's study. But overall, 85 percent of respondents had either no work-related AI use cases or beginner-level use cases. 

Section's report also found that 40 percent of workers would be fine with never using AI again.

This echoes a warning on AI this week at Davos from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who urged the industry to look at whether the benefits of the technology are filtering down to average users.

"We will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource," Nadella said, if AI systems "are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large."

Now these reports from Section and Workday suggest that social permission is rapidly fading, if AI even ever had it in the first place. And that should certainly be concerning to the companies betting big on AI.