Can AI Cover for Your Summer Vacation?
As a litmus test, more firms are tempted to ask AI to fill in for workers during summer vacations. Why that’s a tricky proposition.
Summer usually means people jockeying for vacation time, managers reminding them to coordinate with one another, employees ignoring that request, and managers subsequently scrambling to arrange coverage for those out of the office. The obvious question: How much work can AI take over?
This year, more firms are asking employees to let AI—or more importantly AI agents—step in while they are at the beach or elsewhere for their summer holiday. In fact, amid the continued push to drive AI adoption, some firms and leaders are looking hard at the tech’s ability to “remove the scramble” of summer-vacation scheduling, says Tanyth Lloyd, global vice president of technology and transformation for Korn Ferry’s RPO business. “Firms are closely watching how managers and employees utilize AI agents,” she says. “The remaining team shouldn’t be scrambling to backfill while others are off.”
But experts say the best firms are using AI more as a partner than a substitute, which means that asking AI agents to stand in entirely could backfire. To be sure, the technology could do more of the automated tasks, but “AI can’t fill in for judgment,” says Stephen Lams, a Korn Ferry senior vice president of data and analytics. “If there’s a human on the job, we don’t want AI running by itself.”
Even so, the temptation will be there. After investing billions into AI, firms are anxious to demonstrate results, and summer filling-in might seem a great opportunity. In all, studies show that productivity drops by as much as 20% during summer months; mid-sized businesses can suffer revenue losses of between 15% and 20% during July alone. On the employee side, research indicates that stress and burnout increase—for both those on vacation and those covering them. One in five workers say they’ve gone so far as to avoid taking vacations because nobody can properly cover their work for them.
To some degree, AI agents can help ease the situation, but that will largely depend on the tools employees are already using. “If there are tools you spun up, those components can provide value,” says Lams. For her part, Mirka Kowalczuk, Korn Ferry’s senior vice president of digital services, says decisions about filling in should be largely based on how workload is structured. “The interesting opportunity is that some of these holiday experiments could spark the beginning of proper workflow design,” she says.
Shanda Mints, vice president of AI strategy and transformation at Korn Ferry, says AI can help by summarizing meetings and emails, updating calendars, listing action items, and assigning tasks on behalf of the next colleague who goes on vacation. The “reentry tax” on those returning from vacation is often overlooked, Mints says, but it could potentially cause the same levels of stress and lost productivity that an employee’s absence created in the first place. To be sure, 41% of workers in one survey say they have shortened or skipped vacation because of the time it takes to “dig out” upon returning.
But there is also one lingering concern: If AI can do workers’ jobs while they’re on vacation, why wouldn’t it be able to take over those jobs altogether? Lloyd says it’s an important consideration for leaders seeking to build trust with the workforce about AI adoption. They need to stress that AI is being deployed exclusively to allow people to get away and recharge so they can return to a higher level of performance and productivity.
Lams says the summer litmus test might lead to a reverse outcome: If AI is helping workers be more productive, he says, “there is an argument that one individual going on holiday has a greater impact.”
Learn more about Korn Ferry’s AI in the Workplace capabilities.
