AI in the Workplace: What Will Employees Allow—And How Far is Too Far?

Conversations surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the workplace are nothing new. For years, there have been speculative questions posed about the power, limitations, ethics and scope of AI.

Each question was posed in the future tense. How will employees respond to this powerful tech? When AI arrives, how useful will it be? Will companies be ready to harness its power?

It’s time to change the tense of these questions because the intelligent machines have arrived and they’re already transforming the workplace. Yet, even as the tenses change, the questions remain the same and many remain unanswered.

To answer some of these long-standing and pressing questions, isolved surveyed over 2,000 full-time employees in the United States to get their perspective on how AI is transforming the workplace.

Here are some of our main takeaways from the survey.

AI's Initial Integration into the Workforce

While AI discussions previously took place in the abstract, ChatGPT is the tool that made the concept viable in the workplace. Chatbots have been around for more than 60 years, but this isn’t your grandparent’s AI tool. ChatGPT provides a detailed response to nearly any prompt and its rise has been meteoric: Since its launch in November 2022, isolved research has found that half of the employees have used the tool. An additional 70% reported being open to using similar tools at work in the future.

Ethics Policies Lag Behind

The excitement of productive AI was always tempered by serious ethical concerns that accompany the technology. Loftier concerns include the replacement of human beings with computers and the potential for misinformation proliferation. Other, more ordinary worries deal with things like copyright and privacy issues. Based on the survey, companies are not ready for the arrival of AI: 67% of employers don’t have a clear, formal policy or ethics code for employees to follow.

HR Teams Should Rejoice

For the last few years, HR teams have operated on a clear directive: improve the employee experience (EX) to improve talent retention and acquisition. Employees are bullish on the idea that AI can improve EX and want their companies to utilize AI to do it. Sixty-six percent would look favorably upon their employers if they used modern AI capabilities to improve their experience.

Here are the top AI capabilities employees want their employers to use:

• Anything to make them more productive at work (50%)

• A tool to provide auto responses to FAQs (48%)

• Tools for improved company communication (39%)

• An HR chatbot in the flow of work (31%)

Friend, Not Foe

While ethicists may fret about supplanting human jobs with software, employees are largely not threatened by AI with 61% from our survey confirming it.

The potential of AI is clear, but one burning question remains: are companies ready to properly reign in the awesome potential of this new technology?