AI Costs More In Trust Than It Does In Tokens

Most executives have already decided AI is the future of their business. Or, if not decided, fear that it might be and their competitors will get an advantage first.

But the people who will need to use it every day have certainly not. Intensely low levels of trust is why so many AI initiatives look incredible on slides and graphs, presented to a group of people who wouldn’t ever need to take the actions required to make the technology work, mean the operationalisation of the tools are an unusually hard battle.

The teams being asked to adopt these tools have read the same headlines as everyone else, the ones promising AI will gut white-collar work. In their mind, they pair these with the dire warnings on cost of living and unemployment numbers, and their enthusiasm for adopting something new becomes pretty low. But their motivation to find ways it won’t work will hit record highs.

Leaders asking their teams to embrace AI without telling them how their role is valuable, needed and is the path to company growth, will inevitably fail. Hearing and responding to the concerns in real time is what will ensure the significant investments being made see the returns they should, and help power the organisations to greater margin.

Start with what the people responsible for the financial outcomes of an organisation believe. Across the US, UK, Germany and Australia, 89% of leaders report no impact of AI on their company's labour productivity over the past three years. Three years in, with "cost out" initiatives now running across the economy, that number should look a lot better than it does. The technology isn't the thing holding it back

Among employees, only 12% strongly agree that AI has changed how work actually gets done. Given the level of consumer adoption of tools like ChatGPT and Claude, it’s hard to argue it’s an exposure problem… so why isn’t personal behaviour translating to the workplace?

Part of the answer is trust. Just 53% of frontline staff trust their leaders to bring in AI responsibly, against 71% of senior leaders: an 18-point gap between the people deciding and the people doing. Almost half your team don’t believe you’re capable of introducing this technology in a way that respects their expertise and craft, or that you’ll hear their concerns and act on them as you roll it out.