0 62
% 12% of global workers reported that they have been offered extensive training in AI.
62% said their employer doesn't offer training (or they aren't aware of any).
Chapter 3
Choosing not to invest in a digital labour platform is risky business
Businesses that don't support their employees with agents will find it increasingly difficult to keep up with their competitors.
Conversation is as good as code in the agentic future of work: If you can describe it, agents can do it. This is particularly good news because there's a gap in AI readiness among workers who haven't received the support needed to be effective with existing tools. Only 12% of our respondents said they had been offered extensive training in AI, and 62% said their employer doesn't offer training (or they aren't aware of any). Companies should choose an agentic platform and establish clear policies that encourage their employees to build and use their own agents with defined roles and abilities that are obvious to the user. Businesses that don't invest in making it easy for their employees to use AI will find it increasingly difficult to keep up – ultimately jeopardising their market position and growth potential as their competitors successfully use AI to improve their operations and serve their customers better.
About half of employees say that their usage of AI tools at work is not approved by their employers.
Staff using unapproved AI tools
52%
Employees
66%
Executives
How to support employees
with agents:
1
Adopt an agentic operating system for work
Invest in a centralised platform that makes it easy to deploy and manage AI agents. User-friendly platforms – such as Slack and Agentforce – are simple to integrate and will encourage broader adoption of AI tools across the organisation.
2
Offer comprehensive AI training to employees.
Solve the current skills gap by investing in training programmes. Untrained employees do not use AI tools effectively, leading to missed opportunities and a competitive disadvantage.
3
Link AI adoption to performance and productivity.
Measure AI's impact on team and individual performance. Demonstrating AI's tangible benefits reinforces its value and motivates employees to embrace it.
It's very difficult to find the top-notch talent to develop a bespoke system. It's also really hard to maintain this stuff. Imagine an organisation trying to maintain their own open-source LLMs and then having to update them regularly, which will probably break their applications. It's expensive and hard to resource.
Chief Strategy Officer, Writer
Asking the right questions and knowing how to manage AI agents will become an essential skill. AI agents unlock a whole new workforce. Everyone is going to become a manager with a virtual staff of AI agents, and the people who can do prompt engineering well will be most successful.
Senior Manager
of Digital Workspace &
AI Strategy, ezCater
of Digital Workspace &
AI Strategy, ezCater
If companies want to lean into AI they should spend more time and effort educating, training and walking through use cases because the potential view is to see that training as not adding value, but it is intrinsically linked to actually realising the AI value.
Deputy Director of the Office
of the CIO ManTech
of the CIO ManTech