Employees use AI, but many say they don’t know why

Employees use AI, but many say they don’t know why

Wed, September 23, 2026 at 5:39 PM GMT+3 3 min read

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Dive Brief:

• A majority of people are using artificial intelligence at work, with 85% of recently surveyed global employees reporting that they're being actively encouraged to experiment with the technology, according to a new study from Culture Amp, an employee experience platform.

• Despite this, only 58% said their leaders told them why their companies wanted to implement AI. In addition, just 60% of workers said their managers shared examples of how AI supported their work.

• Meanwhile, 71% of overall employees and 93% of heavy AI users said AI tools made them feel more productive. Nonetheless, 69% of nonusers and 72% of heavy AI users reported having reasonable workloads, meaning both groups were roughly similar. That suggests there may be a disparity between employees' belief in their expanded capacity and their actual output.

Dive Insight:

The report examined data from more than 100 companies representing about 112,000 employees and found that AI adoption is moving too quickly for many companies to keep pace in terms of providing usage frameworks.

"Employees are telling us they understand the risks, they are using the tools, and they feel more productive," Amy Lavoie, vice president of people science at Culture Amp, said in a statement. "That is not a workforce resisting change. That is a workforce that has done its part and is waiting on leadership to do theirs."

Although managers may view AI power users through an adoption metric lens, the report said that may not represent the full picture. Instead, this group "is both finding ways to use AI and feeling more motivated to contribute," the report found. That means companies should try to understand what makes these users different or risk relegating this important subset of the workforce to "simply another measure of AI usage."

Lavoie said that since workload rates remain steady across users and nonusers of AI, companies need to reexamine their overall ROI when it comes to paying for AI.

"The organizations that see a genuine return on AI over the next twelve months won't be the ones with the highest adoption rates," Lavoie said. "They'll be the ones that decided, explicitly, what they were going to stop doing with the time it gave back."

The report also found that 86% of employees said they understand the risks that using AI entailed. That understanding also increased the more employees used AI, beginning at 67% for nonusers and rising to 95% for power users.

However, employees' understanding of internal career opportunities dropped 10 percentage points since July 2025, representing the largest single-year change in the data set. Furthermore, career development satisfaction rates have remained flat at 66% since 2021, suggesting that employees are becoming less certain about their future opportunities.

"Leaders are being asked to explain a future none of us can see clearly yet," Lavoie said. "We do not know with certainty which roles AI reshapes, which skills hold their value, or what a career path looks like three years out. As a result, leaders may go quiet, because saying nothing feels safer than saying something that turns out to be wrong. The most useful thing a leader can do right now is admit the plan is unfinished, and then keep talking anyway. Certainty is not what employees need from you right now. Candor is."

Even as employees feel more productive at work, managers are increasingly losing the capacity to measure that progress, according to a recent report from talent management firm Talogy. That study found that 78% of people reported having trouble assessing AI skills because there wasn't enough guidance available in the current frameworks.