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Employees aren’t struggling to use AI, they’re just not using it.
That’s according to a survey of 3,750 executives by SAP-owned WalkMe, as part of its fifth annual state of digital adoption report, which found that a third of employees haven’t used AI and 54% bypass AI tools to do tasks manually every month.
Now, the folks at WalkMe don’t think this is a sign that AI is underwhelming or incapable. Instead, employees are rejecting AI because of a… trust gap.
“The problem is not AI’s capability,” said Dan Adika, CEO and Co-Founder of WalkMe. “The technology will keep improving. What won’t improve on its own is the human side: the trust gap, the governance gap, the question of who acts, when, and with what guardrails. That’s what this data is really showing.
“And that problem doesn’t go away as AI gets smarter. It gets harder.”
As evidence of that trust gap, the report points to the fact that 9% of workers trust AI for “complex, business-critical decisions” versus 61% of executives. That’s certainly a trust gap, but it doesn’t explain why employees on the front line of work don’t want to use AI to get their work done.
Another figure from the survey does suggest a reason. Sorry Dan, but it’s down to how well AI works – and doesn’t.
According to the survey, 81% of executives are patting themselves on the back over their success improving productivity with AI, but employees say they’re wasting 7.9 hours a week dealing with “digital frustrations”. That means workers lose 51 working days each year, up by 42% from last year, a three-year high.
No-one’s going to want to use AI if it makes them work longer, after all.
That said, the WalkMe report also pins this so-called AI abandonment on fragmentation, rather than AI failings.
Employees have to switch between an average 2.88 applications to complete a single piece of work, the report found. “More than a third say that switching harms their work, and 37% skip AI entirely because it means breaking their workflow and manually moving data between systems,” the report noted.
Another problem is decision latency, in which workers need to stop and think through AI output to ensure it’s accurate, doesn’t conflict with other tools, and is compliant with company policies. The report found 55% of workers only trust AI for simple tasks, with 45% hesitating to use AI because it gives generic answers, 33% because it makes work more complicated, and 29% because they lacked guidance so stopped mid-task.
“That pause is where productivity takes a hit, and it happens dozens of times a day,” the report noted. “When AI can’t carry the full context of the work, the rules, the security requirements, the workflow state, workers do what responsible workers do: they slow down, verify everything, and only use AI when they’re certain it won’t create more problems than it solves.”
The report says this shows the technology works but the “trust layer” doesn’t – but if you can’t trust your AI so spend more time checking its work than doing it yourself, arguably that means the tech doesn’t work well enough as it is.
It turns out that staff do want to use AI – but they want to choose it themselves.
The survey found 45% of employees used so-called shadow AI in the previous 30 days, a third of which did so with confidential data. Execs aren’t keen on that sort of AI use, with more than a third wanting to discipline shadow AI use.
“The use of shadow AI isn’t a behavior to penalize; rather, it’s an opportunity to address a systemic gap,” said Keith Kirkpatrick, Vice President and Research Director of Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows at The Futurum Group. “When employees use unapproved AI tools, they’re compensating for performance or efficiency gaps left by sanctioned tools and unclear governance.”
Or, perhaps, those AI tools just actually work. That might be the key to unlocking AI adoption: using tools that work.
