Dive Brief:
- Enterprise leaders and their employees use AI agents at vastly different rates, with 68% of leaders using three or more agents weekly, compared with just 36% of workers, according to a report from Asana published Wednesday. The work management platform surveyed more than 4,500 CIOs, AI leaders and workers across the U.S. and U.K.
- Less than one-quarter of workers surveyed said available agents can address the tasks they need the most help with. About one-third said agents address some of their needs but leave significant gaps, and one-fifth said agents mostly address lower-priority tasks.
- “Leaders see agents multiplying across the business and have a more holistic view of the value they create both in the short and long term,” Arnab Bose, chief product officer at Asana, told CIO Dive in an email. “The challenge for individual contributors or teams is that they experience the challenges that can come with agent adoption — more tools to juggle, more outputs to reconcile, more questions about who is responsible for what.”
Dive Insight:
Executives are using AI at higher rates than their employees, in generative AI and by an even wider margin when it comes to agentic AI. The disconnect threatens enterprises’ ability to scale tools across the organizations.
The number of agents frequently used also differed between leadership and workers — leaders reported nearly double the number of agents per week compared with workers.
When workers are using agents, nearly half said they spent about 10% of their working time switching between tools, checking which agent to use, managing outputs or the conflicts that arise. And 38% of those surveyed said more than one-quarter of agent work is duplicated or overlapping.
Some enterprise leaders and workers feel hesitation around AI agents’ use as concerns of security and overreach persist across industries.
About one in four AI agents run unmonitored within enterprise environments. And nearly two-thirds of executives said in a recent Workato report that they expect an AI agent in their environment to create a public security or compliance incident in the next year and a half.
Adding agents won’t create value for an organization on its own, Bose said. People and agents have to work from the same plan, with context to do the job and clarity for workers to decide the next best action from AI outputs, he added.
“CIOs should move away from measuring agent activity and start measuring whether work actually gets finished, and what is the most important work for that team and the business,” Bose said.
Trust is a big part of use and adoption, the report said. Leaders were more likely to trust an agent to access information and complete actions autonomously than workers.
“Workers who work alongside agents day-to-day are more likely to notice when an agent acts on incomplete context, surfaces conflicting outputs, or escalates something that needed human judgment,” the report said. “Their caution is calibrated, not uninformed.”
