Employee sentiment toward workplace AI is shifting fast.
Gartner's HR survey makes one thing clear: enthusiasm is no longer the constraint.
The real bottleneck is leadership’s ability to translate that energy into disciplined governance, thoughtful deployment, and measurable business outcome value.
Executives have blamed employee resistance for underwhelming AI outcomes in HR and broader business workflows. The latest market research tells a different story.
Sixty‑five percent of employees now say they are excited to use AI at work. That is not a grudging tolerance of automation; it is a clear signal that the workforce is ready to experiment, learn, adapt, and integrate AI into daily work.
Enterprise Applied-AI Market Development
Yet, according to the research, 37 percent of employees do not use Generative AI tools even when they have access, simply because their coworkers are not using them.
This 'peer inertia' effect highlights a social adoption challenge rather than a purely technical one: people look sideways before they look up. When colleagues are not leaning in, AI tools remain an optional add‑on instead of becoming a core part of the routine operating model.
The survey results undercut the persistent myth that employees are the primary barrier to AI value creation in the enterprise. Gartner’s analysis points instead to executive urgency and rushed implementations that gloss over workforce readiness.
Gartner found that many AI deployment decisions are made without HR at the table, leading to misaligned expectations between leadership and employees and, ultimately, to underuse or misuse of the tools.
This misalignment typically plays out in three common failures:
- AI point solutions rolled out as 'shiny objects' with minimal change management, leaving managers unclear on when and how to use them.
- Employee training is offered as one‑off events, rather than continuous learning journeys that build confidence and capability over time.
- Governance frameworks that focus on compliance and information security, with little attention to employee experience or role redesign.
The result is a paradoxical situation: high excitement, low realized value. HR leaders surveyed in related Gartner research overwhelmingly report that their organizations have yet to see significant business impact from AI, despite growing investments.
The Key Workforce Behavior Indicators
Beneath the latent employee excitement, several key behavioral signals should inform a more strategic HR and IT deployment roadmap. Employees are not just curious; they are willing to invest in their own personal and professional development.
In one Gartner data set, 77 percent of employees who are offered AI training actually take it, underscoring latent demand for skill building when organizations provide structured support.
Among those who already use AI tools at work, 62 percent report time savings, with employees in AI‑relevant roles saving an average of 1.5 hours per day.
That is the kind of enterprise workflow productivity uplift executives expect from AI, but it is still unevenly distributed and often not intentionally reinvested. Yet another disconnent.
Only a small share of organizations provide guidance on how employees should utilize the time freed up by AI, which means that potential gains in innovation, customer engagement, or strategic work often dissipate into ad-hoc tasks.
Gartner’s marketplace segmentation work goes further by identifying four employee archetypes that stand to benefit most from AI augmentation: Consumers, Communicators, Coordinators, and Creators.
Each group interacts with information differently — whether synthesizing insights, crafting messages, orchestrating workflows, or generating content — and therefore requires tailored tools, training, ongoing coaching, and insightful success metrics.
Strategic Implications for Business Leaders
For C-suite leaders, this research reframes AI as a workforce design issue, not just a technology procurement decision. Gartner recommends three critical shifts:
- Reframing AI governance to incorporate employee experience alongside compliance and security.
- Involving HR directly in AI deployment decisions, from use‑case selection to communication and training.
- Identifying curious, collaborative employees as adoption champions, then segmenting the broader workforce by attitudes and behaviors toward AI.
These actions move organizations from mere 'AI tool rollouts' to systemic change.
For example, aligning AI co-pilots with high‑curiosity employees in a sales operations team, coupled with targeted learning paths and clear performance metrics, can generate internal case studies that address both the peer‑inertia problem and executive skepticism.
Similarly, HR can partner with digital workplace and security teams on an integrated governance council to ensure that policies address trust, transparency, and job redesign — not just access control and risk reduction.
Where Strategic Value and Growth Emerge
The most compelling opportunities are less about buying new AI platforms and more about orchestrating employee behavior change at scale. The data suggests three growth vectors for enterprise organizations and solution providers:
- Workflow‑embedded AI: Tools that integrate seamlessly into existing HR and line‑of‑business systems, with clear prompts, guardrails, and feedback loops aligned to specific roles and archetypes.
- Governance and enablement services: Advisory offerings that help enterprises design policies, segmentation models, learning journeys, and performance frameworks that translate AI excitement into measurable productivity and engagement gains.
- Manager‑centric capability building: Programs that equip managers (often the weakest link in AI maturity) with practical playbooks for using AI to redesign team processes, not just individual tasks.
Outlook for Applied-AI Business Value Creation
Organizations that treat AI as a workforce transformation initiative, grounded in HR‑led governance and a nuanced understanding of employee behavior, will unlock disproportionate value.
Those that continue to pursue AI as a series of disconnected tools, launched in a hurry and managed on the sidelines of HR, will continue to see enthusiasm without business outcomes.
"To achieve high employee adoption and effective use of AI solutions, CHROs and their teams should segment employees by adoption attitudes and behaviors using surveys and usage data," said Eser Rizagolu, senior director analyst at Gartner.
That being said, I believe single-event employee training is inadequate to achieve the desired level of adoption and progressive usage of AI tools that business leaders crave. Employee 1:1 coaching with a skilled practitioner is the best way to ensure that lessons learned during training are applied in practice.