What the job-jugglers can teach us about AI

Remote workers with second and third jobs are super savvy when it comes to AI productivity ― and they’re more than happy to talk about it

THE PANDEMIC WFH era created an odd creature in the workforce that we’ve written about now and then in Worklife: the sneaky job-juggler, who has two or more full-time gigs going at once.

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A new report from AI Resume Builder wanted to look at how the job-jugglers were faring. They found, first off, that around five per cent of full-time U.S. workers, and as many as one in eight Gen Z workers, are holding down multiple full-time jobs. They also found that many are using AI productivity tools and large language models (LLMs) to do it ― and not working as long as you might think.

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“Most workers holding multiple jobs report working under 50 hours a week in total ― aided significantly by automation and AI-powered productivity tools,” the report stated. A growing number are even doing multiple full-time jobs in under 40 hours a week.

AI is central to this, with 64 per cent of job-jugglers employing AI productivity tools and LLMs to get the job(s) done. “AI plays a crucial role in helping me manage my time,” one respondent told the surveyors. Others expressed that scheduling, naturally, presents the biggest challenge for job-juggling, but that AI picks up the ball to optimize task assignment, resource allocation and route planning.

All of which lays out some interesting talking points about the deployment of AI in the workplace. When we talk about AI being used as a productivity tool, there’s often an air of generalization about what that actually means; it’s somewhat rare to find frank discussions of what kind of uses workers are organically putting AI to. Plus, there’s a persistent sense of anxiety around admitting to using AI as being a form of cheating.

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Job-jugglers would appear to have no such compunctions (they’re sort of already cheating the system, in one sense), and thus you get a slightly clearer picture of what AI tools mean in the hands of regular employees. Sixty-five per cent use AI to summarize documents; 62 per cent use it to summarize meetings and handle emails; 58 per cent are automating regular tasks and about the same percentage are generating full reports with AI tools. It’s boring, mundane stuff ― but it’s the boring stuff that is the meat and potatoes of workload management.

Rather than unethical, younger generations “are more likely to see working multiple jobs not only as possible, but positive,” said AI Resume Builder’s Rachel Serwetz. “Gen Z’s comfort and familiarity with AI also gives them an edge in productivity, efficiency and managing workloads.” Kieran Delamont