Dan Adika is CEO of WalkMe, digital adoption leaders empowering every organization to realize the promise of its technology.
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May marks two and a half years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT. In the first five days, over a million people signed up to try it. People used it to instantly answer questions, write essays, find recipes and build grocery shopping lists. But while consumers found immediate utility, organizations are finding that bringing generative AI (GenAI) into the workplace is a different ballgame—and the stakes are high.
Let’s look at GenAI’s impact on the human-AI relationship at work and how it’s evolved over the past two and a half years.
The Investment Wave
Every company wanted to get their hands on GenAI capabilities. Executives feared falling behind unless they harnessed the transformative power of GenAI, which led to mass investment in the technology.
But where did this leave the employees of these companies that raced to implement GenAI? They were expected to adapt almost overnight, learning new skills and a new way of working, often alongside the development and implementation of new AI capabilities across the many applications in use. Employees need to use GenAI to transform their work, and they need to know how to mitigate the risks of using GenAI.
Some employees were also contending with fears that AI would replace them, which about one-third of workers worry about. Similar to how automation threatened blue-collar jobs, AI has been seen as a threat to white-collar jobs. The volatile macroeconomy hasn’t helped morale among employees, either, leaving many feeling squeezed and unsure how to meet their new mandate.
What’s Holding Back ROI
According to McKinsey, 78% of organizations regularly use GenAI in at least one business function. Yet, “more than 80 percent of respondents say their organizations aren’t seeing a tangible impact on enterprise-level EBIT,” in other words, their bottom lines. McKinsey finds that a lack of a structured, enterprise-wide approach to adoption and scaling—including training, governance, measurement and communication—is holding back the ROI of GenAI.
To make matters worse, in front of this challenge is a massive visibility gap between executive ambition and employee readiness when it comes to GenAI. WalkMe’s latest survey of 3,700 senior executives and employees found that while 79% of executives express confidence in meeting their AI transformation goals, only 28% of employees feel adequately trained, and only 25% report being able to use AI to work more efficiently.
It’s almost as if some executives believed that simply adding GenAI capabilities to their tech stack would be a silver bullet for success. Accessing the technology is only the first step—it’s more of a prerequisite for the real challenge: getting people to actually use these AI capabilities in the right way, at scale.
Harnessing AI in the workplace is as much of a change management challenge as it is a technological one. To unlock AI’s transformative impact on both businesses and on our individual work lives, everyone, not just a few power users, needs to use AI in ways that drive efficiency and productivity while making the user experience even smoother.
AI’s promise won’t be realized through technology alone; it takes people. Adoption is the missing link, and it’s one I have spent my career solving as the creator of a digital adoption platform (DAP), which is designed to help users learn and use new technology in real time.
How To Get People To Actually Use AI At Work
Workplaces need to hone in on GenAI’s usability and double down on change management.
It is unrealistic to continue to expect users to stop what they’re doing and seek out AI capabilities, which disrupts productivity more than improves it. Instead, a human-centric approach is required, laser-focused on the end-user experience, which helps ensure that AI capabilities will actually be used. After all, AI should help augment human productivity, innovation and creativity.
What That Looks Like In Practice
1. Designing For The Flow Of Work
AI should show up when and where it’s needed—contextually and seamlessly. That means on-screen suggestions, quick summarizations and follow-up suggestions after a customer support call and guided next-best actions inside CRM systems. When AI feels like part of the workflow rather than an optional add-on, it gets used. It has to put the user experience first and not feel like an inconvenience to use.
2. Personalizing Training And Guidance
People have different comfort levels and learning styles. Training programs need to be flexible, adaptive and embedded in the systems employees are already using. Think fewer live sessions and more real-time, on-demand guidance within applications.
3. Prioritizing Transparency And Trust
Employees need to understand what AI is doing, why it’s doing it and its limitations. Clear guardrails, explainability and ethical guidelines aren’t just good governance—they’re essential for building trust and encouraging the kind of experimentation that leads to excellence.
4. Measuring What Matters
Are workflows faster? Are employees more productive? Is customer satisfaction improving? Setting clear KPIs aligned with business goals is essential to gauging true transformation.
5. Bridging The Gap Between Tech Teams And Business Users
One of the most overlooked blockers is the communication gap between those who build or procure AI and those who are supposed to use it. Co-creation, feedback loops and cross-functional collaboration help ensure AI tools are relevant and usable in real-world scenarios. Implementing digital adoption centers of excellence can help in this area.
So…Has GenAI Transformed Work Yet?
Not quite. GenAI has changed expectations, sparked imagination and opened new frontiers. But introducing new technologies does not transformation make. Transformation is about changing how work gets done at scale. That means empowering employees, not overwhelming them. It means designing for usability, not just capability.
The next two and a half years will be less about dazzling demos and more about operational excellence. Organizations that embrace this mindset and invest in adoption, enablement and trust will be the ones that unlock GenAI’s true potential. Done right, GenAI should make work smoother and easier for employees, and their organizations will enjoy increased productivity and a fattened bottom line.
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