Slack wants to sort the different AI personalities at work

Slack is taking a cue from BuzzFeed with a new personality quiz that aims to understand how modern office workers use AI.

In a survey of 5,000 full-time desk workers across six countries, the Salesforce-owned office chat platform sorts workers into five broad buckets depending on their usage of and sentiment toward generative AI tools in the workplace.

From “The Rebel” to “The Maximalist,” the company claims this classification system will help business leaders better organize teams to use AI effectively. (Want to see where you fall on the spectrum? Take the quiz.)

“[The personas] are a reflection of the different ways that employees are using and not using AI, as well as an understanding of the variety of emotions and experiences that people are having surrounding AI at work,” Christina Janzer, Slack’s SVP of research and analytics, said in a press briefing. “We really wanted to recognize that there is no one-size-fits all approach when it comes to your experience with AI.”

To AI or not to AI: While other surveys have clocked a groundswell of employee adoption of AI beyond the sanctioning of bosses, the research report Slack released in July found the opposite. Two-thirds of workers have yet to use AI at work, despite urgency from execs, Slack’s own survey found then.

Janzer said those results prompted Slack’s research team to try to better understand the reasons behind the disconnect.

They found that respondents who do use AI—about half of workers in this most recent survey—are split between Maximalists (30% of respondents), those who use AI multiple times per week and are vocal about its benefits, and The Underground (20% of respondents), a group that uses AI similarly but does so quietly.

Non-users of AI—the other half of respondents—are split among three categories. Rebels (19%) avoid using AI and don’t subscribe to the hype around it, Superfans (16%) are excited about and admire AI advancements but don’t use it themselves, and Observers (16%) are watching the trend cautiously from the sidelines.

Who’s who: There also tended to be some demographic differences between the categories. Three in five Rebels are women, for instance, and more than half are over the age of 45, according to Janzer. Meanwhile, the majority of Undergrounds and Maximalists are men, and the majority of both AI user categories were under the age of 44, Janzer said.

“The gender gap is complicated,” Janzer said. “I don’t think that there’s one thing to explain what’s happening there. I do think that trust is a really big component. This is something that we see in, honestly, most of the research that we do, and we do think that trust is probably a concern that women hold more than men.”

Workers have formed these opinions as enterprise platforms, including Slack and its parent Salesforce, have flooded offices with new generative AI productivity features in the last couple years. These tools aim to help workers with everything from drafting emails and writing code to navigating internal information systems. But there are also signs that some companies have grown disillusioned with the initial promise of AI, according to a recent research report from Gartner.

Janzer said businesses need to understand the range of attitudes toward AI among their workforces when attempting new AI projects and work with employees on their own terms.

“The good news is that these personas are not personality types—they’re not permanent,” she said.