Generative AI reduces working hours for government staff, survey finds

Employees at government ministries and agencies have been able to reduce their working hours by 110 minutes per week, on average, through the use of the Gennai generative artificial intelligence platform, a Digital Agency survey showed Friday.

The online survey was conducted among workers at the ministries and agencies in August and September, collecting valid responses from 6,439 people.

Over 50% of the respondents said they were able to reduce working hours by at least one hour per week.

Specifically, 35.1% said they cut working hours by one to three hours, 10.9% three to five hours, 5.2% five to 10 hours and 3.2% 10 hours or more. Meanwhile, 34.6% said their working hours remained largely the same.

Asked about the effects from the use of the AI platform, many said they were able to “quickly create a rough draft,” “find necessary information from vast volumes of documents” or “catch up with technical knowledge faster.”

The survey showed that 10.4% use the AI platform almost every day, 11% three or four times a week and 26.4% once or twice a week. A total of 31.2% said they rarely use or have never used it.

Gennai, developed and operated by the Digital Agency, is available to about 180,000 government employees and now features an AI agent function capable of autonomously performing two or more tasks simultaneously.