Dive Brief:
- When employees mention artificial intelligence in their company reviews, they’re more likely to rate their workplaces lower than colleagues who work at the same company but don’t mention AI, according to research from the AI-Driven Enterprise Institute, a research and benchmarking organization.
- In its analysis of more than 500,000 employee reviews on Glassdoor, AIDE found that the most significant differentiator was senior leadership. On average, employees who negatively discussed AI rated leadership 2.04 out of 5, compared to 3.34 from employees who said positive things about AI. This gap was wider than for any other category, including pay, work-life balance and culture.
- AI-related dissatisfaction tended to focus on management trust, and employee misgivings were found to rise substantially when “corporate AI promises outpace implementation,” the study said. In addition, “companies that talk extensively about AI without visible implementation” had more than twice as many negative AI reviews as companies that showed clear progress.
Dive Insight:
The study suggested employee responses to AI may “serve as an early indicator of broader confidence in management,” the research said. An increase in negative AI commentary could be a sign that employees are losing faith in leadership’s ability to effectively implement AI and provide clear benefits.
“When employees react negatively to AI, they are often not just judging the technology itself,” Paul Cheek, CEO of AIDE, said in a statement. “They are judging the people leading the transition: whether there is a credible plan, whether it has been clearly explained, and whether leadership can actually deliver on what it has promised. The category that suffers most is trust in management.”
In addition, the study identified what it called “the size of the trust penalty” and said it “depends on whether employees can see companies following through on their AI ambitions.”
The study looked at public company data including patents, job postings and annual reports, and compared how much a company mentions AI against how much AI has actually been effectively implemented. It then identified “AI visionaries” as firms “whose talk about AI outpaces their execution,” whereas “stealth adopters” are companies with the opposite dynamics.
For AI visionary companies, 27.5% of AI-related employee reviews were negative. Meanwhile, the companies that showed both strong ambition and visible execution had a negative review share of 12.6%, and companies “that built quietly, with less leadership fanfare” — the stealth adopters — had the lowest negative percentage, at 7.2%.
“The data does not suggest that employees punish companies for being ambitious about AI,” Cheek said. “They punish the gap between what leadership says and what employees can actually see changing in the business. That gap is ultimately paid for in trust.”
AI adoption can also affect how prospective employees view a company. A recent report from talent insight firm SHL found that 74% of workers said being interviewed by an AI agent would change their perception of the company, with 37% calling it “impersonal” and only 23% calling it “innovative.”
Furthermore, when employees are presented with AI-generated “workslop” from a manager or supervisor, 85% said it damaged their trust in leadership, according to a March report from resume templates service Zety.
