survey<\/a> by Roloff Consulting, which finds rising discontentment among the ranks when it comes to AI. Close to eight in 10 employees, 77%, describe feeling \u201cskeptical, overwhelmed, or scared\u201d with the AI activity taking place within their enterprises. <\/p>\nClose to half, 45%, say AI has created more work, not less. \u201cAI outputs require extensive validation,\u201d the study\u2019s authors point out. “Different teams are using the tools differently, creating inconsistency and rework. And because organizations haven\u2019t redesigned workflows to meaningfully integrate AI, people are doing their original jobs plus the new AI-adjacent tasks on top.”<\/p>\n
Interestingly, there is no daylight between the feelings of executives and staff employees toward AI. Both groups are feeling pressure at exactly the same rate: 55% of respondents across both groups report urgency to adopt AI, rating it a 4 or 5 out of 5.<\/p>\n
At the same time, 71% feel their company\u2019s AI strategy is either reactive or non-existent. It appears, at least in employees\u2019 views, AI may be either leaderless or in the wrong hands. Only 7% felt their company\u2019s AI efforts were in the right hands. The majority, 61%, said \u201cthe wrong people are definitely leading it,\u201d and 33% had no idea who was leading it.<\/p>\n
\u201cRespondents weren\u2019t just expressing frustration at being excluded,\u201d the report\u2019s authors said. \u201cWhen decisions are made without the knowledge of the people closest to the work, and those decisions create more burden instead of less, trust erodes. And eroded trust is very hard to rebuild.”<\/p>\n
Training is often the best antidote for discontent and skepticism, but many business leaders don\u2019t seem have gotten the memo. Only 20% of individual contributors report access to training sessions. They\u2019re basically on their own, learning any way they can. The message from their employers appears to be \u201cadopt AI quickly, but we\u2019re not going to help you get there.\u201d<\/p>\n
As one survey respondent put it: \u201cThe lack of training and understanding of AI, and the strategy the company wants us to adopt, creates more work, less direction, and makes it more challenging to move my team in a productive direction while still trying to hit KPIs.\u201d<\/p>\n
What do employees want? They expressed the following sentiments as to where their companies\u2019 AI went off the track: <\/p>\n
The urgency is manufactured. This one really bites deep. “Workers who have lived through previous technology cycles are skeptical of the narrative that speed is everything. This isn\u2019t resistance to change. It\u2019s a reasonable response to pressure that often serves the interests of technology vendors more than the organizations buying what they\u2019re selling.”<\/p>\n
AI is a tool, not a strategy. \u201cWorkers said this plainly and repeatedly,\u201d the survey finds. “They\u2019re not pushing back on AI itself. They\u2019re pushing back against the conflation of deploying a tool with having a strategy.”<\/p>\n
There is no strategy, by the way. “The pattern that emerges is one of performance without direction. Organizations are adopting AI because it feels like what you\u2019re supposed to do. Not because they\u2019ve done the hard work of identifying what problems they\u2019re trying to solve.”<\/p>\n
Who\u2019s minding the store? No one in particular. \u201cA recurring concern is that organizations are not accounting for the real cost of AI use. Validating outputs, catching errors, fact-checking, and managing inconsistencies all take time \u2013 often as much time as doing the task directly,\u201d<\/p>\n
Training should be baked into AI efforts. “The ask is simple: ‘Help us understand how to use this well. Help us understand what it can\u2019t do if you are requiring us to use it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Open up the conversation. “They have domain expertise, process knowledge, and real insight into where AI could help and where it can\u2019t. When that knowledge is bypassed in favor of top-down mandates, the result is both a worse strategy and a demoralized workforce. Transformation is about people, not technology.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A call for AI leadership getty The verdict is in: employees are not happy with the way artificial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12026,24,12027,25,8809,12025],"class_list":{"0":"post-16489","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-4ps","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-ainbsp","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-gap-inc","13":"tag-roloff-consulting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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