Dive Brief:
- Employees and students preparing to enter the job market report time-saving benefits from using AI, but some fear the impacts of the technology on their job security, a survey conducted by CNBC and SurveyMonkey, released Monday, found. The organizations surveyed 1,686 workers and students in the U.S. in July.
- The frequency of AI use is uneven among workers — 30% use it daily, 34% use it a few times a week and 37% never use it. But only those that use AI on a daily basis feel positively about the technology’s effect on their job security. Respondents who use AI only a few times a week or less say AI makes them feel less secure. The same trend continued with daily users, who were the only group to say the technology makes them feel optimistic about the overall job market.
- “Even when replacement is not the near-term reality, employees worry that AI will reduce the value of their expertise or change the work they are known for,” Adam Preset, VP analyst at Gartner, told CIO Dive in an email.
Dive Insight:
Workers reported time savings and confidence in their skills while using AI, but a lack of official policy and inconsistent guidance on who should use the technology holds them back.
Tech hiring delivered mixed results in July — while unemployment continued to dip, the labor market saw a push toward AI-savvy workers as automation finds its way deeper into core operations.
More than half of employers didn’t have an official AI policy at work, and very few organizations took a hard stance against using the technology or banning it completely, according to the CNBC and SurveyMonkey survey.
Lack of clarity has sown distrust among employees, who are keeping the technology at arm’s length because they’re not properly introduced or trained on it, Preset said. Employees often feel they could face accountability for a tool’s mistakes and that AI is something being done to them, not with them, he added.
“Distrust is a reasonable response to how AI is being introduced in many organizations,” Preset said. “AI tools can sound confident even when they are wrong and employees may not know what data a system is using or how it decides.”
Although organizations have heavily invested in AI, there’s often a large gap between CIOs’ expectations of their workforce and the reality of their abilities, because they haven’t been given sufficient — or any — training for how to use AI at work, J.P. Gownder, VP and principal analyst at Forrester said in an email.
“Employers have also forced AI tools onto employees without articulating what benefits AI might have to the employees themselves, as opposed to the benefits purely accruing to the company,” Gownder said.
CIOs who scale up adoption by risk, starting with tasks that employees already feel comfortable with, like drafting and research, will see more success with adoption, Nick Patience, VP and practice lead of AI platforms at The Futurum Group, said in an email. Once employees feel comfortable with those workflows, an organization can push higher-stakes decisions.
How leadership addresses AI use can help make employees more comfortable and less afraid of how it could negatively impact their jobs. Many organizations are offering mixed messaging — use it, but not too much, find ROI, but don’t tokenmaxx, Preset said.
“It’s an absolutely new technology to them and they’re being asked to find the Goldilocks zone of usage and value in short order, but still do their day jobs,” Preset said.
