Dive Brief:
- The pressure of AI adoption is weighing on enterprise tech leaders, as 61% report that they fear losing their job if they fail to lead their organization through the AI transition, a survey of 2,400 knowledge workers and executives by AI platform Writer found.
- Three-quarters of executives said they are expecting AI use across their organizations to expand within the next five years. But increased use comes with feelings of insecurity, the report found — half of executives said that they feel their own skills are becoming obsolete in the age of AI.
- Tech executives that succeed through their AI transitions will take an authoritative approach to their strategies, said Mina Alaghband, chief customer officer at Writer, in an email to CIO Dive. “The executives showing real agency aren’t asking ‘What’s our AI strategy?’” she said. “They’re asking, ‘What’s my access to the tools and infrastructure I need to build my own agent workforce, and how are we governing this at scale?’”
Dive Insight:
AI adoption is creating a sense of job insecurity across all enterprise stages, as tech executives and younger-career knowledge workers alike fear the technology will displace them.
AI spending and deployment is expected to triple in the next two years, according to Deloitte. The spending surge indicates further enterprise adoption as businesses deal with the fallout.
Meanwhile, 75% of executives said they expect AI agents to be part of their company’s C-suite within the next five years. But executives reported that AI skillsets are lacking — 58% said they think their fellow C-suite leaders don’t have the fundamental knowledge to make AI strategy decisions.
The disconnect is creating stress for top-level tech executives, the report found. More than half said AI adoption has created “power struggles and disruption” at their organizations, and 69% reported they are undergoing layoffs because of AI.
Nearly half of executives said these issues with adoption could lead to them losing their jobs in the next year. But human-centered skills such as judgement, domain expertise and institutional knowledge aren’t being displaced, Alaghband said.
Tech leaders should look at AI strategies as talent decisions, considering what expertise they are aiming to systematize, or which judgement frameworks they are aiming to build into AI workflows, she said.
“The most sophisticated organizations are capturing decades of tacit knowledge and distributing it enterprisewide through intelligent systems,” she said.
The report found that most organizations have a gap in employee expertise. On one side are super users that report high levels of use and productivity. On the other, those who rarely use or resist it. The gap exists in knowledge workers and in the C-suite, the report found.
AI is fundamentally redefining jobs, Alaghband said. It is shifting value away from executing tasks to orchestrating system.
“The onus is on leaders to raise the ceiling on human ambition,” Alaghband said. Executives must “help people reimagine roles that don’t exist yet, champion cross-functional ownership over narrow specialization, and recognize that influence now follows outcomes and AI leverage — not activity or tenure.”
