71.9% of workers generally comfortable with AI: Survey

We noted in an earlier question the struggles with employee resistance when using AI in the workplace – namely, 40.5% of all respondents pointed to initial resistance/discomfort with adopting AI at work.

Interestingly, that’s not reflected in the question of how comfortable employees themselves are with using AI tools.

Nearly one in three (31.8%) say their colleagues are very comfortable with using AI tools at work, and another two in five (40.1%) say they’re somewhat comfortable – that’s a total of 71.9% who are comfortable to some degree.

If the majority of workers are generally fine with AI at work, then any challenges including resistance and discomfort are perhaps seen as easily overcome.

In other words – any newfangled thing will be met with some initial apprehension – but everything can get better, including the experience of using AI in the workplace.

The industry lens

Construction leads in terms of comfort with AI tools in the workplace (85.1% vs. 71.9% overall – a 13.2-point difference), followed by IT / Technology / SaaS (77.5%) and Accounting / Finance (75.9%).

Healthcare (57.9%) and Education (61.1%) aren’t nearly as comfortable with AI tools. In fact, they’re rather neutral (29.4% and 27.3% vs. 20.8% overall), and even more “somewhat uncomfortable” (10.8% and 10.4% respectively, vs. 6% overall) than the baseline response.