It’s quite possible that your boss is using AI more than you.
Leaders are employing AI at almost twice the rate of individual contributors, a new Gallup poll released Monday shows. In the survey, 33% of people identified as leaders or managers, or “manager managers,” frequently use AI more frequently, compared to 16% of individual contributors.
Jim Harter, chief scientist in workplace management and welfare at Gallup, told Business Insider that leaders are likely putting pressure on them to think about AI and think about ways to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
“Perhaps because more leaders are experimenting with it, they see the urgency and see it as a potentially competitive threat,” Harter said.
Data Points were one of several findings from Gallup’s survey on AI recruitment in the workplace, including:
The number of US employees using AI at work at least several times a year has increased from 21% to 40% over the past two years, with AI usage rising from 11% to 19% in 2023, doubled from 4% to 8% of employees surveyed. Only 22% of people who say their company shared plans or strategies, said that 30% of employees have “general guidelines or formal policies” to use AI in work “strongly agree” with employees who use AI that the AI tools provided by the company help their work.
AI adoption has increased overall over the past two years, but that increase has not been evenly distributed throughout the industry. Gallup reports that AI adoption has “mainly increased for the role of white-collar,” with 27% saying it is currently using it frequently in surveys, an increase of 12% from last year.
Among white-collar workers, research shows that AI is frequently the most common in the tech industry, with 50% followed by 34% and 32% of funding. Meanwhile, according to Gallup’s vote, frequent AI use between production workers and frontline workers has declined from 11% in 2023 to 9% this year.
While concerns about AI eliminating employment have also not increased overall over the past two years, the report shows that employees in industries such as technology, retail and finance are more likely to believe that AI will one day do the job.
Researchers suggest that the most common challenges regarding AI adoption are “unclear use cases or value propositions,” suggesting that companies may not provide clear guidance.
The report said that if employees say they “strongly agree” that leadership shares a clear plan for using AI, they are three times more likely to feel “very prepared to use AI” and feel comfortable using it at work.
“In some cases, you need training to make AI available as a complement to other more accurate text analysis tools,” Gallup’s Harter told BI.
Harter said that while organizations are increasingly developing plans for AI use, “there is still a long way to go,” that may not be one approach.
“They evolve in their own right, so they’ll have to continue to be trained in how to use it,” Harter said.
