Nathaniel Whittemore

Basically, the strategy is kind of not clear.

39% don't have a formal strategy in place to drive revenue from AI.

And a full 75% said that their company's AI strategy was more for show than actual internal guidance, which is obviously just a recipe for disaster.

56% said that AI had created power struggles and disruption at their organization, which is a big jump from 42% last year.

On the flip side, there's continuing employee sabotage of the efforts.

29% of employees, including 44% of Gen Z, admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy.

And 76% of the C-suite said employee sabotage poses a serious threat to their company's future.

35% of employees said that they'd entered proprietary, confidential, or sensitive information into a public AI tool.

And two-thirds of executives said that they believed their company had already suffered a data leak or security breach because of an employee using an unapproved AI tool.

And if you want to get a sense of why, I think you have to point to a gap in leadership.

Just 35% of employees said that their manager is an AI champion.

75% said that they trust AI more than their manager for certain work tasks.

That is just an incredibly damning statistic that is showing up downstream, I think, in everything else.

And increasingly what you're getting then is effectively two tiers in the workplace.

92% of the C-suite said that they're actively cultivating a new class of AI elite employees, with 60% planning to lay off employees who can't or won't use AI.

AI super users are about 3x more likely to have gotten both a promotion and a pay raise in 2025 compared to those who aren't using AI.

In its recent State of Digital Adoption report, SAP subsidiary WalkMe surveyed 3,750 executives and employees across 14 countries and found something similar.

Their report found that 33% of employees hadn't used AI at all, and another 54% had in some cases bypassed their company's AI tools to complete work manually instead.

And once again, the story here is a difference between employees and leadership, which is, to put it bluntly, a leadership problem.

For example, 61% of executives trust AI for complex business-critical decisions, but only 9% of workers surveyed in this survey did.