Lifull Survey Finds 82% of Staff Agree GenAI Increased Their Productivity Last Year

Japanese marketplace operator Lifull has released findings from an internal employee survey showing that 82% of surveyed employees said generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) increased their productivity in the 12 months to September 2024.

This was an increase of over 10% from the previous survey, with employees also saying they had freed up a combined 41,820 hours of work during the period, or 3.2% of total working hours.

Two-thirds (66.4%) of respondents said GenAI improved the quality of their work.

The majority of respondents said GenAI helped them save up to four hours of work per month, with a further 18.5% of employees saying GenAI helped them save up to eight hours of work per month.

Lifull said:

The percentage of employees by job type who are able to utilize generative AI is nearly 100% in engineers and designers, thanks to the effects of incorporating generative AI into their work operations.

Even in back office and sales positions, where barriers to adoption are generally thought to be high, 84.3% and 74.9% of employees were able to use the system, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of the company-wide initiative.

By creating working time through the in-house use of generative AI, the proportion of core work that leads to goal achievement has increased by approximately 2.9% to 5.3% compared to the same period last year.

Lifull said the majority of work done with GenAI involved creating and editing documents and materials, gathering and/or organising information, performing data analysis, and generating ideas.

Lifull went on to reveal that the number one use case for GenAI was optimization of customer response flow:

We built a system that uses generative AI to perform multifaceted analysis and determine customer priorities. In addition, we optimized responses so that they could be handled in small task units, enabling efficient responses in teams.

Other use cases included automatic generation of email text and search engine keyword analysis.

Tomohide Hirose, project leader for utilizing GenAI at Lifull, said:

"At LIFULL, our vision is for all employees to be able to use generative AI to improve the efficiency of their own work, and we have formed a cross-sectional project team that transcends organizational boundaries to promote its use within the company.

As a result, we achieved a total of 20,732 hours of work efficiency improvement in the six months from October 2023 to March 2024, and 41,820 hours of work efficiency improvement in the one year period up to September 2024. We believe that the reason we were able to achieve such results in such a short period of time is because we introduced the chatbot function in Slack at the beginning of the project and prepared the environment, and then simultaneously improved the utilization skills and motivation of the entire company through training and awards systems.

As we move from the implementation phase to the establishment phase, we not only aim to enable the 17.1% of employees who are not yet able to use generative AI to do so, but also aim to increase the number of scenarios in which it is used by employees who are already able to use it, so that it becomes a matter of course." [Translated from Japanese]

Respondents were all full-time employees and contract Lifull employees, with 649 valid responses to the survey.