Are your company's AI decisions good for employees? 68% of C-suite leaders aren't sure

Employees' perspectives on artificial intelligence in the workplace range from cautiously optimistic to downright fearful. But just as employees shouldn't be afraid of new technology, leaders shouldn't be afraid of asking their workforce for input around new tools.   

Sixty-eight percent of the C-suite admit that their company has made AI-related decisions that are not in employees' best interests, according to a new survey from software company UKG. But Hugo Sarrazin, chief product and technology manager at UKG, says it's more about communication than bad decisions. 

"It's not that management is making decisions where employees are losing," he says. "It's just that they are making decisions on behalf of the whole enterprise."

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Seventy-eight percent of employees would be more accepting and excited about AI if their company was more transparent about how it could improve their workflow, according to UKG, and 75% said it would be easier to get on board if they better understood how AI was going to impact the organization overall. As for employees who are open to embracing AI, 63% say using new tools would increase their engagement, 55% their willingness to go above and beyond, 54% overall happiness, 49% their desire to stay at a company and 48% their trust in leadership. 

UKG has had to navigate these concerns and trends internally. The software company started a governance group that includes engineers, product teams, HR teams and marketing teams to ensure that across the company, everybody is on the same page about next steps. 

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"Talk about it," Sarrazin says. "It's important to talk about ethical use of AI, where it's being used and most importantly, to help employees know what that means. Make everybody interact with it and feel it to see the power of what it does and doesn't do well."

According to UKG, companies using AI today estimate that 70% of their total workforce will use the technology AI to automate at least some of their job tasks in the next five years. Even leaders at organizations that have yet to embrace AI now anticipate that 20% of the workforce will be using these tools in the next five years. The impact, in short, will only grow — and now is the time to test and learn. 

"We're all doing some pretty basic stuff now with ChatGPT," Sarrazin says. "What we need to do is get really good at tuning models, maintaining models and evolving models. There's always going to be the question of where to draw the line, but the capability of doing that is there, too."