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As leaders continue to strive to find AI’s magical ROI, a new study from Workday suggests employees aren’t set up for success.—thanks to archaic employment structures.
According to the study, employees are using 2025 tools while stuck in 2015 job structures because fewer than half of jobs have been updated to reflect AI capabilities. Workday’s survey collected responses from 3,200 full-time employees at organizations with annual revenue of $100 million or more.
Workers are quickly being asked to apply human judgment and knowledge to a huge amount of content that AI generates for them, and historically, these types of skills take 10 years to learn, said Aashna Kircher, group general manager for the CHRO office at Workday.
“These are very high-level skills,” Kircher said. “Right now, all the training I see is very focused on how to use AI and not on how to develop and apply discernment and judgment around AI-generated outcomes. And I think that’s the disconnect for senior leaders.”
Kircher said the first step to addressing this mismatch is to analyze each business function to determine what the core skills associated with the job should be and what parts of it should be automated.
The study found that HR leaders bear a disproportionate share (38%) of the burden of “AI redesign”: fact-checking, reviewing and editing text produced by AI. People in IT positions, meanwhile, make up just 32% of those doing this work.
This partly depends on the different work processes. “[IT roles] “We use it as a starting point, as a thought partner, to accelerate the process of creativity and iteration, but understanding that the outcome is imperfect and doesn’t require the same level of scrutiny,” Kircher said. “Whereas in the context of something like HR, precision, tone, impact, how you frame things, matters so much.”
Kristin Stoller
Editorial Director, Fortune Live Media
kristin.stoller@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
