- BCG survey finds that workers feel more confident and anxious about AI than they did a year ago.
- Leaders are more confident in AI than their employees and have received more training on it.
- Companies are trying to address the AI knowledge gap through employee upskilling programs.
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Generative AI appears to be a double-edged sword.
be New reports A Boston Consulting Group survey found that workers’ trust in generative AI has grown over the past year, but so has their anxiety.
BCG surveyed more than 13,100 respondents, evenly split between frontline, management, and leadership roles.
The survey found that trust in generative AI rose 16% between 2023 and 2024, but anxiety also rose to about 5%. The share of workers who worry that AI will eliminate their jobs in the next 10 years has increased significantly over the past year.
Frontline workers without management responsibility are the most anxious about technology, with 22% saying they are anxious, compared to 18% of managers and 15% of leaders.
There’s also a clear knowledge gap between management and employees: Only 28% of frontline workers say they’ve received training on how technology will impact their jobs, compared to 30% of managers and 50% of leaders. Frontline workers say their biggest concerns about generative AI are that they aren’t given enough time to learn about it, there aren’t enough training opportunities, and they don’t know when to use the technology.
“There’s definitely an AI talent shortage,” Alex Libre, co-founder and lead recruiter at Einstein Talent, a service that matches job seekers with AI startups, previously told Business Insider.
Companies are trying to bridge this gap by offering upskilling programs to their employees.
Consulting firm PwC rolled out a training program to teach its 75,000 employees in the U.S. and Mexico how to incorporate technology into their daily work. The goal is for all 75,000 employees “to know how to use it and be able to make informed comments,” Shannon Schuyler, PwC’s U.S. chief purpose and inclusion officer, previously told BI.
Others say the goal is to enable humans to do more meaningful work and get more fulfillment from it, but the worry now is that AI may create a dividing line between the haves and the have-nots: those who know how to use it and can keep their jobs, and those who don’t, lose their jobs.