Chief executives are relying on a combination of carrots and sticks to encourage employees to use artificial intelligence, a technology leaders expect to transform business, from the making of goods, to the delivery of services, to the number of humans they employ.
But are they using it themselves? Not as much as you might expect. Some CEOs and other corporate executives are spending less time with the technology than their employees, and more than a quarter of them aren’t using it at all, according to new data.
The gap risks deepening the divide between workers and leaders over how—and how much—AI will boost productivity and alter future employment.
On the carrot side, bosses are incentivizing workers to adopt and experiment with AI by handing out cash bonuses and awarding merch to those who comply. More stick-like tactics to spur AI adoption include tracking workers’ AI usage and factoring AI fluency and enthusiasm for the technology into performance reviews.
But behind the doors of the C-suite, the CEOs and executive teams imposing those rules are largely only casual users of AI themselves. Nearly 70% of CEOs, CFOs and senior executives are using AI at work less than an hour a week—including 28% who never use it—according to a new survey of more than 6,000 senior executives across four countries (the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Australia) co-authored by renowned Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and 12 other scholars. Some leaders reported more frequent AI use: 24% of respondents report one to five hours of AI use per week, while 7% report using AI more than five hours in a typical work week.
