AI risks widening the workplace divide, new report finds

PA Consulting, a Jacobs company, has released a new report revealing that AI risks widening existing workplace divides.

A survey of 2,000 U.K. employees found senior leaders are pulling significantly ahead in their ability to turn AI into meaningful results. Seven in ten senior leaders (70%) say AI helps them achieve things they could not have done before, compared with just 38% of employees in entry-level and junior roles. Meanwhile, almost a third of the workforce (32%) say they have yet to see meaningful benefits from the technology.

The report warns that organizations risk deepening existing gaps in expertise, capability and performance if they focus on AI adoption and efficiency alone. To realise AI's full potential, leaders must do more to help employees across the workforce develop expertise, exercise judgement and remain accountable for their work.

Key findings include:

• Senior leaders are pulling ahead. Senior leaders use AI more than three times as often daily as employees in entry-level and junior roles, averaging 6.9 uses a day. Seven in ten senior leaders (70%) say AI helps them achieve things they couldn’t have done before, compared with just 38% of entry-level or junior employees. Similarly, three quarters of senior leaders (72%) report higher-quality work from AI, versus 43% of entry-level and junior employees.
• Working faster doesn’t mean working smarter. While 60% of employees think AI helps them work faster, more than a third (37%) admit to then spending as much time reviewing and refining AI-generated work as they would have spent producing it themselves. Almost a third of workers (32%) are yet to report meaningful benefits from AI.
• The more people use AI, the more they trust it. One in five employees (20%) admit to feeling overly dependent on the technology, and one in eight (12%) say they trust AI's judgement over their own. Frequent users were 1.5x more likely to trust AI over their own judgement than medium users.
• Accountability is becoming less clear. 66% of workers believe accountability remains with the person responsible for an output, regardless of AI’s involvement. However, 21% are unsure where accountability lies and a further 13% feel less responsible for quality when AI has produced most of the work. More than one quarter of employees (26%) feel uncomfortable signing off work that has been shaped by AI.
• AI’s benefits vary sharply between sectors. The sectors where employees report seeing meaningful benefits from AI are in technology, media and telecommunications (87%), financial services (77%) and energy and utilities (75%). Reported benefit realization is considerably lower in healthcare and life sciences (55%), the public sector (53%), and charities and not-for-profit organizations (39%).

The report identifies four priorities for leaders:

1. Rebuild the pathways to expertise, by ensuring employees still have opportunities to learn, interrogate AI outputs, practise judgement and develop skills alongside AI.
2. Turn faster work into better outcomes, by measuring the business value AI creates, rather than adoption rates or frequency of use alone.
3. Decide where human judgement belongs, by maintaining appropriate oversight in areas where errors carry greater risk or consequences.
4. Align accountability with control, by defining responsibility for AI-enabled decisions, outputs and systems and ensuring responsibility sits with the right people.