65% of employees are excited about using AI at work

According to a study by Gartner, Inc., which provides business and technology insights, 65% of employees said they were excited about using AI in the workplace.

Executives often attribute the lack of business value from AI to employee resistance to adopting AI tools, but that's not actually the case.

According to a July 2025 Gartner survey of 2,986 employees, 37% of employees don't use AI even though they could because their co-workers aren't using it.

According to Gartner research, the root problem is often executive impatience that leads to rushed adoption of AI without fully considering the impact on employees.

“Decisions to implement AI are often made without HR involvement,” said Eser Rizagolu, Senior Director, Analyst, Gartner HR Practice. “This leads to poor implementation, misaligned expectations between employees and management, and ultimately prevents organizations from realizing significant business value from AI.”

To get the desired value from their AI investments, Gartner recommends that CHROs take three actions to rethink their organization's AI adoption strategy.

Reimagine AI governance to focus not only on compliance and information security, but also on planning for impact on employee experience.
Try out AI tools and identify digitally curious and collaborative employees to target for AI learning.
Segment your workforce by attitudes and behaviors toward AI and create personalized learning journeys that create a culture of AI-powered work behaviors.

Co-lead AI governance, ensure employee trust, and stress test your environment

With HR left out of the AI strategy discussion, CHROs must proactively manage the impact of AI adoption. To avoid the negative impact of AI on employee experience, CHROs should collaborate with the digital workplace, security, legal, and business units within the enterprise-wide AI governance team.

“To convince executives of HR's critical role in AI governance, CHROs need to position AI as a workforce issue and communicate HR's ability to detect risk while acting as a partner to ensure AI tools increase productivity, engagement, and retention,” said Lizagol.

Prove the value of AI augmentation by targeting collaboration

While governance teams stress test AI solutions, CHROs should work with HR business partners (HRBPs) and business leaders to identify which employees should be drafted into piloting AI solutions during the proof of value (POV) phase. The best choices for the POV stage are employees who are not only able to easily collaborate with colleagues, but also have an interest in digital. CHROs can identify employees who fit into four worker archetypes who can benefit most from AI:

Consumers: They need to ingest large amounts of data and information and extract it for insights to make informed decisions.
Communicators: Obtain information and create messaging through offers, news, actions, and other communications.
Coordinator: Organizes and prioritizes information from multiple sources to improve workflow.
Creator: Converts data and information from one format to another.

Once CHROs have created one or more cohorts of employees that combine these four archetypes, they should use AI to improve individual and team-based goals and enable collaboration.

Assess and classify employee adoption personas to scale AI impact

Once your AI use case has been properly stress-tested and meets your governance team's requirements and your organization's value needs, you're ready to scale it across your organization. CHROs should then survey POV employees and analyze AI usage data. This feedback can be used to assess whether the quality and timeliness of deliverables has improved compared to without AI.

“To achieve high adoption and effective use of AI solutions by employees, CHROs and their teams must use survey and usage data to segment employees by adoption attitudes and behaviors,” said Lizagol.

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