A call for AI leadership

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The verdict is in: employees are not happy with the way artificial intelligence is being percolated through their organizations and into their jobs. In fact, they even see those executives or managers leading AI as either clueless or incompetent.

That’s the word from a new survey by Roloff Consulting, which finds rising discontentment among the ranks when it comes to AI. Close to eight in 10 employees, 77%, describe feeling “skeptical, overwhelmed, or scared” with the AI activity taking place within their enterprises.

Close to half, 45%, say AI has created more work, not less. “AI outputs require extensive validation,” the study’s authors point out. "Different teams are using the tools differently, creating inconsistency and rework. And because organizations haven’t redesigned workflows to meaningfully integrate AI, people are doing their original jobs plus the new AI-adjacent tasks on top."

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.

At the same time, 71% feel their company’s AI strategy is either reactive or non-existent. It appears, at least in employees’ views, AI may be either leaderless or in the wrong hands. Only 7% felt their company’s AI efforts were in the right hands. The majority, 61%, said “the wrong people are definitely leading it,” and 33% had no idea who was leading it.

“Respondents weren’t just expressing frustration at being excluded,” the report’s authors said. “When 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."

Training is often the best antidote for discontent and skepticism, but many business leaders don’t seem have gotten the memo. Only 20% of individual contributors report access to training sessions. They’re basically on their own, learning any way they can. The message from their employers appears to be “adopt AI quickly, but we’re not going to help you get there.”

As one survey respondent put it: “The 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.”

What do employees want? They expressed the following sentiments as to where their companies’ AI went off the track:

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’t resistance to change. It’s a reasonable response to pressure that often serves the interests of technology vendors more than the organizations buying what they’re selling."

AI is a tool, not a strategy. “Workers said this plainly and repeatedly,” the survey finds. "They’re not pushing back on AI itself. They’re pushing back against the conflation of deploying a tool with having a strategy."

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’re supposed to do. Not because they’ve done the hard work of identifying what problems they’re trying to solve."

Who’s minding the store? No one in particular. “A 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 – often as much time as doing the task directly,”

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’t do if you are requiring us to use it.’”

Open up the conversation. "They have domain expertise, process knowledge, and real insight into where AI could help and where it can’t. 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."