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AI may be losing some of its out-of-the-box sheen for office workers.
Slack’s latest Workforce Index report found that adoption in the US has slowed considerably in recent months as employees seem to be fretting about the stigma of tapping such tools at work. Workforce adoption grew just one percentage point in the last five months—from 32% to 33%. That’s an especially stark dropoff from the start of the year, when usage jumped six points in a single quarter.
Slack’s report, based on a survey of more than 17,000 global workers, attributed some of the slowing to uncertainty around when AI use is appropriate. Among the nearly half of US workers who reported being uncomfortable admitting AI use to managers, the top reasons included feelings that AI might be considered cheating and fear of being seen as incompetent or lazy.
“Workers are very confused about when it is socially and professionally acceptable to use AI at work,” Christina Janzer, Slack’s SVP of research and analytics, said in a press briefing. “We learned that people really struggled to know how and when they should be using it.”
Previous research has shown that workers have often been quicker to whip out ChatGPT than their employers have been to buy into it—a trend Microsoft dubbed BYOAI. But companies have also worried about the risks of diving into AI too fast, including information security and accuracy concerns, and sometimes struggled to scale AI experiments past prototype phases.
Crossed wires: Slack also pointed to a mismatch between how executives would like workers to spend time saved by AI (on innovation and learning new skills) and how workers report actually spending extra hours (on busy work and existing projects).
“There’s a disconnect here,” Janzer said. “Executives and employees are just not on the same page. They’re not communicating effectively.”
Clearing up the rules: Despite the challenges of AI adoption, companies still remain intent on investing in internal AI office tools in the coming months, and enterprise companies like Slack parent Salesforce and Microsoft have continued to weave the tech into products.
In order to make sure employees are along for this ride, Janzer recommended setting clear guidance around AI usage and pointing tools to areas where the tech can be most valuable.
“Employers and employees both have a really important role to play here in accelerating AI adoption and helping to push past this plateau that we’re seeing in the data,” Janzer said. “[They can] really help address the blockers—the blockers being the lack of training, the lack of guidelines, the unclear norms—that’s how we’re all really going to move forward together.”