If your company isn't seeing great returns from its investment in AI, you might want to look at the humans tasked with deploying it and how you can motivate them. Right now, many employees fear AI-driven job losses and aren't well trained to use the tech, according to Forrester.

The research and advisory biz says in its latest report that low employee readiness is the main thing holding back business success with workforce AI programs.

According to its own data, Forrester believes 68 percent of organizations are using generative AI in deployed production applications, which sounds somewhat on the optimistic side to us.

It claims that, among decision-makers, 81 percent say AI copilots are important for assisting employees. Workers must therefore adapt, it declares. This isn't happening.

Using its own metric, the AI quotient (AIQ), to measure the readiness of individuals, teams, and organizations for AI, Forrester says employees in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Australia failed to progress meaningfully over the past year.

There are two reasons put forward for why businesses aren't advancing as measured by Forrester's AIQ yardstick: One is that most organizations fail to effectively train their staff in the use of AI tools. The proportion of firms that say they offer internal AI training to non-technical employees grew slightly last year, from 47 percent in 2024 to 51 percent.

Prompt engineering – a key skill for using generative AI tools – fared even worse, with just 23 percent of organizations saying they offered training for this.

The second reason is that employee fears are stunting adoption. While few jobs were lost to AI in 2025 and future job losses are not expected to constitute a job apocalypse, worker anxiety regarding this is pervasive, Forrester says.

There could be a good reason for this: public statements by CEOs saying that axing jobs is exactly what they want to do.

A survey last year found that just over half of UK business leaders (51 percent) saw AI as a way to cut investment in staff. Another report found that 43 percent of business leaders expect to reduce entry-level roles (including both cutting existing roles and not hiring new staff) over the next year in favor of AI, while 50 percent "specifically" said AI is helping them reduce headcount. 

Forrester's own data found 43 percent of employees are concerned that many people will lose their jobs to automation over the next five years, while a quarter suspect it will impact their own job during that period.

This creates an ambient environment of anxiety and mistrust that hinders progress, it states. The report cites one business leader as saying: "Some of our employees fear job loss, and it turns them away from AI altogether."

The solution is for organizations to frame workforce AI as an opportunity builder for employees and articulate the benefits from an employee perspective. Those that fail to do so will see job loss worries magnify, the report claims.

Businesses need to invest in learning and engagement programs to raise their staff's AIQ. This can demystify AI tools and reduce panic about job loss, Forrester reasons. After all, why would a firm replace employees with AI if it is investing to help them use it?

Forrester has obviously never heard of companies that force employees to train their own replacements before showing them the door.

• AI spurs employees to work harder, faster, and with fewer breaks, study finds
• 'AI brain fry' affects employees managing too many agents
• AI adoption at work flatlined in Q4, says Gallup
• Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop,' Stanford study says

Formal learning "plays a surprisingly small role in raising AIQ," we're told, and organizations that instead get social learning right tend to succeed with workforce AI.

"The organizations that treat AI literacy as a strategic priority, not a box-ticking exercise, will be the ones that unlock meaningful productivity gains and long-term competitive advantage," claimed Forrester VP principal analyst JP Gownder.

This is the same JP Gownder who told The Register in January that he "remains unconvinced that AI will revolutionize productivity."

At the same time, a report from professional services biz PwC found that more than half of CEOs had seen neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from using AI, despite their investments in the technology. ®

More about

• AI

More like these