AI adoption is up while employee confidence in the technology is down. A report from ManpowerGroup explains why.
Despite mass AI adoption, workers‘ confidence in the tech fell.
One factor could be a lack of training.
Companies are looking for ways to mitigate frustration.
For every process or workflow where AI saves time and boosts efficiency, there are a half dozen that leave Tabby Farrar’s team feeling like the technology is useless.
Farrar is head of search at the UK-based SEO and web design agency Candour. Digital marketing, like nearly every other industry, is heatedly debating the topic of AI. And though her team is keen to embrace the benefits of working faster and more efficiently, and of clawing back time otherwise spent on less interesting tasks, it doesn’t always work that way.
AI can generate product lifestyle imagery for clients who don’t have any, but it hallucinates or misses key points when creating executive summaries of data. Refining a prompt to help assign categories to datasets could take so long, Farrar might as well have done the job manually.
„As a manager, I’m trying to get the team more on board with AI stuff, because it’s the future of so many industries“, Farrar said. On the other hand, „There’s just so many people going, ‚I have lost two hours of my day trying to make this thing work.'“
Farrar and her team aren’t the only ones navigating the gap between what AI promises and what it can actually do — and perhaps losing faith in the meantime. Worker anxiety will cause real problems
A January study from workforce solutions firm ManpowerGroup found that for the first time in three years, workers‘ confidence in AI declined, dropping 18% while adoption grew by 13% year over year. The divergence in those numbers may not only signal that the honeymoon phase with AI is over, but also serve as a wake-up call for organizations about how they implement AI tools in the workplace.
„You can’t have an intimidated workforce and be fully productive. That anxiety is going to cause real problems“, said Mara Stefan, VP of global insights for ManpowerGroup.
