Managers more enthusiastic than workers about AI, Slack survey finds

Managers are eager to push AI tools in the workplace—but many of their employees are wary, according to a recent survey by Slack.

The latest edition of Slack’s annual Workforce Index found 96% of executives feel “an urgency to incorporate AI into business operations,” with the percentage who plan to do so in the next 18 months rising from 5% in September 2023 to 35% in March 2024.

Still, 32% of desk workers report having used AI tools for work, and 93% said they didn’t feel like they could fully trust AI to take over work-related tasks. Just 27% said they were “completely” or “very” confident in the trustworthiness of AI-generated outputs, while 39% reported moderate confidence. Another 35% of respondents said they found AI outputs to be only slightly or not at all trustworthy.

The two biggest factors blocking AI adoption are “a lack of trust and then a lack of training,” Christina Janzer, SVP of research and analytics at Slack, told IT Brew. The survey found almost 40% of desk workers said their company has no AI policy, while only 15% strongly agreed that they had the education and training required to use AI effectively.

“There’s all this hype around it, but people aren’t being enabled by their leaders and employers to actually be able to use it,” Janzer said.

Also concerning was the finding that many workers who use AI on the job often don’t reallocate the time saved to more productive pursuits. Instead, they said they spent 37% more of their time on “routine administrative tasks.”

Janzer said that while that’s a red flag, the onus is on managers to reconsider whether they’re sending the right message about priorities.

“Managers tend to incentivize the wrong things,” Janzer told IT Brew. “And so managers tend to prioritize activity metrics they can easily track, so number of hours that they work, number of emails sent, number of tasks completed.”

“There’s a big opportunity, as we’re sort of figuring out this AI thing, for managers to rethink how they measure productivity, and to focus less on the input metrics and more on the output,” she added.

The survey indicated workers who use AI overwhelmingly reported increased productivity, as well as scored higher on metrics like job satisfaction and passion for their work.

That means the enthusiasm gap between management and employees is bridgeable, Janzer added. One element that’s often missing is a clear understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the tools on offer—workers won’t know which tasks AI can handle easily or which ones it performs terribly until they try. Managers can also reassure workers AI is intended to replace busy work, not jobs, Janzer advised.

“That’s what’s really critical for employers, to create space for employees to do those types of experiments, to give them sort of more comfort and more confidence in what is AI really good at, what I can really trust in order to make my job better over time,” Janzer added.