Nathaniel Whittemore

It's now cultural, organizational, and deeply structural.

Now importantly, Ryder is actually dealing with the new reality of agentic.

May continues, the shift towards agentic AI has moved at a pace that's hard to overstate.

AI isn't rolling out at the edges anymore.

Instead, organizations are embedding agents directly into their mission-critical workflows, where they make autonomous decisions and fundamentally change how work gets done.

On the one hand, you can feel the ambition.

There's an entire cohort of AI-native leaders and employees who are compounding their advantage in real time.

They're working faster, more independently, and more creatively than we could have imagined just a year ago.

But all of that enthusiasm is running headlong into chaos.

Agendic AI is exposing a deep structural gap that most enterprises just aren't prepared for.

It's showing up in misaligned incentives, siloed teams, and outdated operating models that are reaching a breaking point.

So this study surveyed 2,400 knowledge workers across the US and parts of Europe, and was split half and half between C-suite executives and employees.

All employees in the study were required to be actively using generative AI tools at work, and executives were required to be working at a company that permits the use of AI.

Basically, this is a voice of AI adopter study.

Couple of the highlights that I thought were interesting.

One is that on the one hand, leaders are in many ways out ahead of their employees when it comes to AI adoption, with 64% of those surveyed spending at least two hours a day using these tools.

75% of executives believed that AI agents would be part of their company's C-suite within the next five years.

And yet, a full 73% of CEOs said that their company's AI strategy was causing them stress or anxiety, with 38% reporting a high or crippling amount of stress.

61% of executives fear they could lose their job if they fail to lead their organization through the AI transition.

And when you dig into the numbers, it's not hard to see why the strategy is successful.