In this edition of “Office Optional With Larry English,” Larry discusses how to encourage your employees to adopt your company’s AI initiatives.
Slack’s November 2024 Workforce Index found 97 percent of executives feel urgency around AI adoption, but only one-third of employees have given the technology a try. What’s behind this stark discrepancy? Christina Janzer, Slack’s senior vice president of research and analytics, says a lot of it comes down to leaders ignoring something very human — how employees feel about AI.
To help leaders accelerate AI adoption and prepare workers to work with AI agents, Slack recently published an AI persona quiz. The quick quiz — available to anyone for free — groups quiz-takers into five personas, ranging from “The Maximalist,” who uses AI at work all the time, to the “Observer,” who is more cautious about diving into AI. Janzer says the quiz is intended to be a tool for leaders to gauge how their people are feeling about AI and come up with a strategy to encourage adoption.
AI Adoption Comes Down to Human Emotion
The distribution curve of AI personas looks similar to the standard technology adoption lifecycle curve, but Janzer insists there are subtle, yet important differences. “There’s going to be similarities to other technology adopted in the past, but what we’re seeing now is far more nuanced and complicated.”
Driving that nuance is a web of complex emptions around AI. For instance, Slack’s June 2024 Workforce Index found only seven percent of workers find AI to be completely trustworthy. This points to a very strong emotion: Fear.
“When you think about the external narrative around AI, it’s complicated,” Janzer says. “You hear dramatic language around job threats and losses. This causes some people, particularly those who fall in the ‘Rebel’ persona, to feel threatened. They feel AI is a threat to society, that AI is happening to them. When this fear is present, you have to shift the conversation to help people see AI as a tool they can use, not a threat.”
By digging into how employees feel about AI, whether excited, anxious, apathetic or puzzled, leaders can better understand how to encourage AI adoption. “Emotions help us predict adoption and sustained use of AI,” Janzer says. “There’s still much to do to understand the human side of AI. There’s so much conversation around this amazing technology and the way it’s evolving, but if we don’t meet people where they are, we’ll never drive adoption.”
While each persona has differing needs around AI adoption, there are some key themes when it comes to getting everyone excited about using AI at work.
Eliminate uncertainty around using AI at work.
Employees need to know what, when and how they’re allowed to use AI at work. Slack found 40 percent of desk workers say their employer has no AI policy, and nearly half wouldn’t want to admit AI use to their managers.
“We know people are using AI and hiding their usage,” Janzer says. “Maybe they’re hiding because they don’t want to be seen as incompetent, lazy or cheating. But people are also hiding because they simply don’t know if they’re allowed to use it.”
Help people feel comfortable using AI tools.
Many organizations are letting employees flounder in discomfort with AI — Slack found 30 percent of desk workers have spent zero hours on AI literacy, whether self-directed or company-mandated.
Janzer points out that AI literacy programs don’t need to be complicated. What’s important is giving people space and time for experimentation. At Slack, employees had 10 to 15 minutes of daily microlearning on AI, and most of that time was dedicated to encouraging people to experiment with AI to solve real problems, Janzer adds.
Give employees confidence around AI.
What can AI do better than humans? What do humans have over AI? Janzer says figuring this out can help employees feel more confident in AI use. “We encouraged people to break down their jobs into different steps and make a direct comparison between how AI performed versus the employee,” she says. “This helped people know where AI will help and augment their specific job and what they need to continue doing as a human.”
Emphasize how using AI at work can make work feel more joyful.
Research shows that employees using AI score higher on engagement, work-life balance, work satisfaction and ability to handle stress. Paint this picture for employees, explaining how AI can help make them more efficient and give them a hand with tasks they find less enjoyable. Janzer suggests employees look at their to-do lists. The tasks that are always at the bottom or constantly avoided may be good candidates to see if AI can help.
Make the AI revolution feel like a community effort.
Leaders need to be transparent about AI, including thoughts around how the technology will impact the business and how AI will change work for employees. By sharing their own emotions, good and bad, with employees, leaders can include everyone in the AI journey.
“There’s going to be an evolution which will require people to actively engage and experiment and start to understand the role AI is going to play,” Janzer says. “It’s not something leaders are going to figure out in a silo. By bringing employees along in the process, they become decision makers alongside executives and can start making recommendations on the role AI can play in their jobs. This helps dispel fear, lack of trust and uncertainty.”
Cultivate trust with transparency from the top.
It may sound obvious, but leaders need to lead during AI integration efforts. They can’t just tell employees an AI tool is available and expect people to run with it. In this scenario, employees fill the vacuum of information with a tangled web of emotions around AI — most of them negative — and adoption is less likely to happen.
“We’re putting so much onus on individuals to figure out how to use AI,” Janzer says. “The onus should be more on leaders. There’s a parallel path here. Encourage people to experiment, but leaders also need to take more leadership to put definition around the organization’s vision for AI use and the role it will play, and to introduce it in a transparent way.”
That said, Janzer believes that AI agents, the next wave of AI tools, may help solve a lot of AI’s adoption problems. Agents require clearly defined roles and guidelines, which eliminates a lot of guesswork around how, when, and why to use them — for both leaders introducing the tool and employees using it.
High-Tech Tools, Human Workers
If leaders want more employees to use AI at work, they must explore how employees feel about the technology, help them feel more comfortable, confident and knowledgeable using AI tools. Leaders must also be transparent about their vision for an AI-powered future.
AI is an advanced technology, but the heart of AI adoption is very much human. Janzer poses a challenge to leaders in AI-challenged organizations: “How can you create a positive culture around AI usage where people know it’s not just allowed via guidelines but also feel celebrated and encouraged to use it?”
This blog was originally published on Forbes.com.
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