Culture Amp’s first AI at Work benchmark, drawn from roughly 112,000 employees across 123 organizations on its platform, finds that 85% of employees say their company actively encourages them to explore and experiment with AI. Only 58% say their leaders have clearly explained where the company is actually headed with it, a 27-point gap that Culture Amp calls the lowest-scoring item in the entire benchmark. Just 60% say their manager shares concrete examples of how AI can support their own goals or workflow.
Why it matters: adoption pressure without direction is a known failure pattern in change management, and this data shows HR teams are still running into it with AI specifically. Seventy-one percent of employees say AI tools make them more productive, rising to 93% among the heaviest users, yet workload scores barely move between power users and non-users, 72% versus 69% reporting a reasonable workload. Something is absorbing the capacity AI frees up, and it is not showing up as relief for the people using it most.
“Employees are telling us they understand the risks, they are using the tools, and they feel more productive,” said Amy Lavoie, VP of People Science at Culture Amp. “That is not a workforce resisting change. That is a workforce that has done its part and is waiting on leadership to do theirs.” The original insight here is what the benchmark buries below the adoption numbers: awareness of internal career opportunities fell 10 percentage points in a single year, the largest year-over-year move in the dataset, even as satisfaction with career development held flat at 66%. Employees are not unhappy with their development. They increasingly cannot see what AI means for where that development leads.
Related: AI Is Quietly Hollowing Out the Leadership Pipeline
Source: Culture Amp via PR Newswire
