Employees at Japan's government ministries and agencies have cut their working hours by an average of 110 minutes a week through the state's generative artificial intelligence platform, according to a Digital Agency survey published on Friday.
The online survey was conducted in August and September among workers at the ministries and agencies, and collected valid responses from 6,439 people, the Japan Times reported.
More than half of respondents said they had reduced their working hours by at least an hour a week. In detail, 35.1% said they had cut one to three hours, 10.9% three to five hours, 5.2% five to ten hours and 3.2% ten hours or more. A further 34.6% said their hours had remained largely the same.
Asked what the platform was useful for, 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".
Use of it is uneven. Of those who responded, 10.4% use the 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 it or have never used it.
The platform, Gennai, was developed and is operated by the Digital Agency and is available to about 180,000 government employees.
It now includes an AI agent function capable of autonomously performing two or more tasks simultaneously.
The headline figure is an average, and it is worth asking across whom it has been averaged. Of the 6,439 people surveyed, 31.2% rarely open Gennai or have never opened it, and a further 34.6% report no change in their hours at all. The 110 minutes are shared out across all of them.
This makes the result more impressive than it first appears, not less. The platform is saving time for civil servants who do not use it, which is the most efficient form of time saving available to any software, because it asks nothing of the user and takes none of their afternoon.
Our analysts have followed the logic to the end of the dataset. If the weekly saving holds across the full population of roughly 180,000 employees, and if the non-users continue not to use it, then a measurable share of the Japanese state's productivity gain is now being generated by officials who have not opened the application and have therefore spent no time on it whatsoever.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes that the agent function can perform two or more tasks at once, while an unopened platform performs an unlimited number, at the same moment, for nothing.
There is one limit to the method, and it is a matter of arithmetic rather than policy. The saving is reported per week, and the survey ran across two months. Nobody has yet asked the Digital Agency what Gennai would save if nobody used it at all.