HR leaders and employees want to embrace AI, but organisations are failing to prepare the workforce, according to a study by Oracle and Future Workplace.
People are ready to take instructions from robots at work according to a new study conducted by Oracle and Future Workplace, a research firm preparing leaders for disruptions in recruiting, development and employee engagement. The study of 1,320 US HR leaders and employees found that while people are ready to embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) at work, and understand that the benefits go far beyond automating manual processes, organisations are not doing enough to help their employees embrace AI and that will result in reduced productivity, skillset obsolescence and job loss.
The study–AI at Work–identified a large gap between the way people are using AI at home and at work. While 70 percent of people are using some form of AI in their personal life, only 6 percent of HR professionals are actively deploying AI and only 24 percent of employees are currently using some form of AI at work. To determine why there is such a gap in AI adoption when people are clearly ready to embrace AI at work (93 percent would trust orders from a robot), the study examined HR leader and employee perceptions of the benefits of AI, the obstacles preventing AI adoption and the business consequences of not embracing AI.
All respondents agreed that AI will have a positive impact on their organisations and when asked about the biggest benefit of AI, HR leaders and employees both said increased productivity. Employees believe that AI will improve operational efficiencies (59 percent), enable faster decision making (50 percent), significantly reduce cost (45 percent), enable better customer experiences (40 percent) and improve the employee experience (37 percent).
HR leaders believe AI will positively impact learning and development (27 percent), performance management (26 percent), compensation/payroll (18 percent) and recruiting and employee benefits (13 percent).
“As this study shows, people are not afraid of AI taking their jobs and instead want to be able to quickly and easily take advantage of the latest innovations,” said Emily He, SVP, Human Capital Management Cloud Business Group, Oracle. “To help employees embrace AI, organisations should partner with their HR leaders to address the skill gap and focus their IT strategy on embedding simple and powerful AI innovations into existing business processes.”
