The new CIO mandate: Selling AI to employees

As organizations roll out AI applications and AI-enabled smartphones and devices, IT leaders may need to sell the benefits to employees or risk those investments falling short of business expectations.

That’s because employees have decidedly mixed feelings about AI coming to their workplaces, according to the recent survey by IT solutions integrator Insight, even as many enterprises are already adopting or experimenting with AI and as AI-enabled phones begin hitting the market.

The good news for organizations deploying AI: 41% of employees indicated they are curious about AI, 31% are excited, and another 31% were hopeful, according to the survey. But 35% also said they felt cautious about AI, 26% skeptical, and 25% uncertain.

Nearly three-quarters of employees surveyed said they believe AI devices will make them more productive. But 45% also said they feared that AI will make their work less relevant to their employers, and 43% said they fear the loss of their jobs due to AI.

Employees fearing job loss should take comfort in the 2024 Stanford AI Index Report, which found that while AI is gaining in capability, it can’t match humans in many complex cognitive functions, notes Daniel Barchi, CIO of CommonSpirit Health, a healthcare provider.

“This supports the adage, almost 10 years old at this point, that AI will not replace employees, but employees who use AI will replace employees who do not use AI,” he adds.

Still, a report surfaced earlier this month that global banks and investment firms are examining the possibility of replacing entry-level financial analyst positions with AI.

The CIO as AI champion and coach

The employee concerns voiced in the survey suggest that CIOs need to be advocates for AI within their organizations, says Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner focused on emerging technologies. CIOs should be “change agents” who “embrace the art of the possible,” he says. “They need to have a culture of experimentation.”

Barchi agrees, adding that part of a CIO’s role is to demystify AI, show how it will be helpful, and explain how the organization is safely and appropriately adopting it.

“CIOs are company executives and change agents first, and technologists second,” he says. “Our responsibility as CIOs is certainly to fund and empower work to develop and implement AI tools safely in our workplace.”

But IT leaders also have a vital role to play after deploying AI tools and AI-powered devices, Insight’s survey suggests. Just under half of those surveyed said they want their employers to offer training on AI-powered devices, and 46% want employers to create guidelines and policies about the use of AI-powered devices.

CIOs should work with their organizations’ HR departments to offer AI training, Chandrasekaran recommends. Good CIOs will have a vision of the tech skills their organizations will need in the next three years or so, he adds.

Employee training on AI is essential, says Sam Ferrise, CTO at Trinetix, a tech consulting firm. CIOs and CTOs must also set the rules of the road for using AI and navigate or mitigate potential risk and ethics issues, he says.

“Navigating AI integration in the workplace involves a nimble approach, particularly in aligning technological advancements with the well-being and development of our employees,” he adds.

More than half of the surveyed employees, when asked if they had concerns about AI, cited potential security breaches. Nearly half raised privacy or ethical issues, and four in 10 said they were concerned about employers listening in when they are using company-issued AI-enabled devices.

The opt-out option

Employees also fear that employers will force them to use AI-enabled devices. A third of those surveyed want the option to choose devices that aren’t AI-enabled when their employers offer newer smartphones.

The survey question about AI-enabled devices is timely. AI-enabled smartphones, those containing chips powerful enough to run AI applications, are already coming to the market. Gartner, in an IT spending forecast released in April, predicted that 22% of all smartphones shipped this year will be AI-enabled, rising to 32% in 2025, and 56% in 2026.

The same Gartner forecast, using survey results from late 2023, found that 55% percent of all companies planned to deploy AI or machine learning tools by the end of this year. Gartner analyst John-David Lovelock suggested that timeline was ambitious for most companies.

The survey’s results, showing both employee excitement and trepidation about AI, seems to mirror attitudes about new technologies going back many years, says Rob Green, chief digital officer at Insight, the company that released the survey. The dotcom bubble, for example, went from great hype to cynicism after the bubble burst, then to proof of viable online business models, he notes.

“With each one of these new cycles comes enthusiasm and apprehension both,” he says. “With gen AI, there’s more enthusiasm. It is something that we’re going to leverage to drive productivity.”