What’s emerging in the scramble for AI tools among companies of all types and sizes is that front-line staff are far more wary of these innovative and controversial systems than executives. New data released by human resources management firm SHL shows exactly how detrimental this trust divide is for affected employees in certain applications of AI. This news may make smart business leaders pause, and some may even reconsider how they train their staff to use AI tools.
A new report provides the first big eye-opening statistics. While many U.S. employees are “interested in AI,” 74% of employees surveyed said that if they were “interviewed by an AI agent,” their perception of companies implementing AI tools would be affected. Just under four out of 10 people said it’s because AI is “inhuman.” While this may sound like a deep distrust of AI tools in the job interview process, an even worse statistic is that only 27 percent of workers surveyed said they had “complete trust” in their employers to “use AI responsibly.”
Meanwhile, 56% of workers said they would prefer humans to review job applications rather than AI systems, likely because 59% believe AI exacerbates bias in the application process. Beyond starting a new job, 58% (nearly 6 in 10 employees) do not want AI to be used to evaluate their job performance or make decisions that will have a long-term impact on their career. 53% feel that their employer’s use of AI makes them “less human”, and one in five (21%) say they would actually like it if AI were phased out and companies returned to more human-centered workplaces and job search practices.
As the SHL report itself states, the data shows that while “people may appreciate the speed of AI,” they still don’t trust AI to make “good decisions without human involvement.”
Conversely, SHL data also shows that nearly half of U.S. workers actually want to upskill to better utilize AI in the workplace. Nearly one in two said they would take an online course to learn AI-centric skills, and nearly 29% said they would make the most of their personal time to “improve their AI fluency and stay competitive.” The big speed change here is that one in four employees say they’re not sure what “AI skills” actually mean.
All this paints a clear picture. Employees are ready to broadly embrace AI and recognize that they will need to learn new skills to fit into the AI-centric workplace of the future. However, they are concerned about the apparent lack of guidance from employers and have strong distrust in employers using AI responsibly. This is especially true for issues that affect individuals, such as job applications, performance reviews, and even more sensitive human resources issues such as determining discipline and performance improvement plans.
In this sense, front-line employees appear to be more familiar with the various limitations, biases, and potential misinformation built into AI tools than corporate leaders. After all, the report found that AI tools exhibit racial and gender bias when it comes to some hiring-related matters.
This means that the use of AI could “rapidly shape the innovative or non-human perception of companies,” according to Sara Gutierrez, SHL’s chief scientific officer, as reported by HRDive, as stated in the SHL report. Gutierrez said that while workers are “open to AI to improve efficiency and consistency,” they “still value employers being transparent about where and how AI is used, especially in decisions that impact their careers.”
Previous research has shown that a company’s reputation may be more important than ever when employees consider who to apply for a job, and this new data fits directly into that. If you beat the AI drum too loudly without demonstrating that you intend to use AI responsibly and with sufficient human oversight, you risk driving away potentially valuable job candidates. It may even tempt existing employees to seek alternative employment at companies that are perceived to be more reliable in terms of AI tools.
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